My boat is a Downeaster 38 built in 1979. At DownEasterYachts.com you can learn about its history.
So now we are approaching it’s 38th year and she is in good shape. How did that happen? Nobody knows how long a well maintained fiberglass boat will last. Just about anything aboard can be renewed or replaced if you want to. And for a well thought out design and good hull, there is no reason not to keep her maintained. This blog is about a few of my projects that I think might be of interest to other boat owners. I’ve gotten a lot of help and advise off the Internet and so I owe the net my due return.
She was named Ocean Cloud by the original owner and I am the second owner, for the past 27 years.
In an oddity of circumstance, I purchased the first boat, that the first-boat-broker showed me. And without hesitation too. Or regret since. It wasn’t love at first sight, but I had read books and studied and had a notebook of “outta-haves”, so when I saw Ocean Cloud, she met most of the requirements until I found something better. The longer I owned her, the more I came to appreciate how incredibly difficult it is to improve on a good design and that I wasn’t going to find a boat “roomy like a Winnebago” and “corners like a Porsche”.
I think of it as the Darwinism of Boat Design. Like most new boat owners, I started thinking of all the things I was going to improve on, but kept bumping into other things that interrelated, interfered, overlapped or were compromised by my tampering with this or that. I evolved to realized that I wasn’t as smart as I thought and what I had was the evolutionary result of many smart people who went before me, each contributing a life of thoughtful ideas and designs, most of which got cast aside in the long run because of competing ideas and designs from other bright people. In the end, we should consider ourself lucky if 1% of our great ideas pass the evolutionary test and will be seen in boats after our lifetime.
So after 27 years with Ocean Cloud, and a humbling number of ideas and designs of mine which I will not mention, here are a few I wish to pass into cyberspace and cast their fate to the great Darwinism of Boat Design.
Good luck with your boating activities and projects and I hope this helps.
January 2016
Gene Allen