I had a dream of sailing around the world, a troubadour with guitar and Irish whistle in hand, hippy of hippies, spreading caring and love as I would go.  And you say, “Are you for real?”  Sure I am.  Yet, despite the whimsical appearance of such a dream, there is nothing fairy tale’ish about doing it.  I was a new to sailing in 1999.  Little did I know when I bought Tryst, a 1982 Southern Cross 28, that in November 2005, the dream would actually bring me to sailing solo RTW with just 2 stops in the southern hemisphere. NZ and Tierra Del Fuego.  There was no concept of sailing around the Capes when I started. I was going to gallavant around the world though certainly planning to cross oceans.  Tryst, later named Inspired Insanity, had been sitting on a dock in St Thomas for 7 years without going for a sail when I first saw her. She looked like a little apartment.  Cute curtains, upholstery, ceramic dishes, a v-berth master bedroom.  My boss at the time, knew the boat and the owner.  He said it was the right boat for what I wanted to do.  He vouched for my employment and I was able to finance the boat over 3 years.  Taking his word that it was the right one, I never looked at another boat.  I sensed she was.  Tryst and I had one of those bonding moments right at the start when while excitedly showing her to a friend, put my foot on the salon floor to feel inches of water under my feet.  Luckily, we had put a new battery on the boat for the survey and managing to remember where the bilge switch was, she was saved from sinking that very night.  My brother who had seen the sparkle of life in my eyes when I started sailing in 1999, put up the down payment and a start to reparations. She was mine.  Newly divorced, 3 grown kids, I was going to sail the world.

There was the obvious repairs to make from damage and age issues.  She was at that golden age of 20 years and hadn’t been seriously sailed for the last 10. Hurricane Marilyn had done some damage.  The haul out of the survey revealed a soft area in the keel but other than that, not a blister to be seen.  Strangely, a woman, wandering through the yard one day, a bit disgruntled, stopped only long enough to say “I wouldn’t pay 10 grand for that piece of shit boat” and she kept walking.  I wasn’t hearing any of that then. I was in love and this sailboat, my dream ticket.

For the survey, the systems seemed to light up, but it wasn’t long before the lack of use and infiltration of water into the wiring and instruments was revealed.    The depth sounder, autopilot, wind meters and knot meters all shut down.  The storage locker was full of safety equipment, inverters, a wind generator.  They were ceased, rotten and no use to me.  I had trusted the experienced eye of optimistic people who genuinely thought this gear would be good but now I would start from scratch.  I had a partner at the time whom was more than handy and willing to teach me.  We tore that boat apart.  Every piece of rubber, every pump, even the transmission seal was no good.  We gutted her to and started to rebuild.  She got simple real quick no longer being built to look pretty but to house one person, with musical instruments, and sail oceans.  I never put the electric pumps back in, or the ACv system, nor did I replace the boat’s instruments.  I was content to have a handheld GPS and take a chance in shallow water.  But when it came to the rig, it was different. Having already planned to do ocean crossings, I made sure ‘Skip the rigger’,at Compass point, made the rig a degree or 2 bigger than standard for the SC 28’. New lifelines and a new bow pulpit.  I used old parasailing launch line for halyards and sheets. 

            Her first real run was to Margarita and then on to the Venezuelan coast, Trinidad and up the Antilles. We arrived back in Nov. of 2001, in good shape but I was starting to feel my oats and my desire to venture off and discover was pulling me on. I had a spiritual score to settle with myself.  Loving to play Irish music, an avid session player when stateside, dreams of Ireland were dancing through my head. I would sail the world gently, short hops.  Bermuda, Azzores….

The only real issue we had found on the trip south was breaking stainless fittings.  I vowed to turn them all out, chainplates and all.  I would need to fix that soft keel and get a steering vane.  I went into Indpendent Boatyard with a 3 month plan.

Somehow I managed to splash her again in just over that, but no one could have imagined how I would make it.  The plan had been to let her dry out for 6 weeks before grinding away at the keel.  My ex husband had a canoe building shop in NY for years and we had built our house.  I was familiar with composites and woodcraft shop tools, but I became best friends with a 10oz Makita grinder leant to me by the friendly wooden boat restorer 2 boats down.  By the time I got out of the yard, I wore it out, owing him a new one, as I had ground the whole bottom of that boat a dozen times.  The intial attempt to grind out the soggy cloth on the keel revealed a wet unending delaminated, osmosis nightmare that covered the entire hull of the boat below the water line.  I was angry now.  Not at the old owner.  He didn’t know.  But this whole dreamy eyed idea of sailing the world was really getting screwed up.  I had muscles as a fitness trainer and enough experience with composites that there was no way I wasn’t going to fix the hull but I wasn’t happy with God, who ever he was…at all.  The words of the woman in the yard that day, who I later found out was Cat, the owner of an older hull SC 28’, came back to me.  The next time I crossed path with Cat, also a solo sailor, she explained that my boat’s hull number was the first built after a change in the relationship between the builder and designer. There were questions about the newer boats structure.  She had serious deck hull joint issues with her boat that left her nearly sinking on a crossing from the Canaries to the Carib.  When she walked by that earlier day in the yard, she had just had to have the joint repaired.  There were weak spots in this boats design and build for a true bluewater boat. 

            From St John�s Coral bay, I was off to RI, my first solo sail.  4 days out, enjoying the SSB, David Jones was doing the morning net telling every boat to get off the ocean.  A big gale was coming.  He got to me, paused and said, �Donna, you are just too slow, you are going to have to sail through this gale.�  When I went to transmit a response, the radio blew, not just a fuse� It was dead.  7 days later I arrived in RI.  2 major gales, the prop spun off, alternator died, as of course did the radio.  I determined I wanted a 3^rd reef in the main.  I made my repairs in Bristol thanks to a good reference in Rabbi, great folks in a great town and some gigs playing music to fund me.

             I left RI July 14^th only to have to return right away.  The alternator, just rebuilt, was not putting out over 12v.  They hadn�t changed the diode� fancy that. Well, a few more days and I took off. After a week of trying to make contact using the radio, I realized that despite the fact that Cay electronics told me she was fixed, she wasn�t transmitting.  Herb couldn�t hear me.  Neither would my mom�s friend who was suppose to track me through my checkins.  The first real storm I did out there was 40� seas, a force 9. It took out my steering vane, and mainsail.  I had to make a choice.  Would I go back?  With no self-steering I was going to have to be on the deck 24/7.  I had a spare main sail but it was the top of a bigger sail and only had one small reef in it.  I learned to rig up the tri sail as a 3^rd reef main for storms. I steered for 24 days without any true sleep.  33 days after leaving RI, I arrived in Baltimore Ireland, brought into the harbor by the Royal Life boat because my fuel was contaminated and clogging the only filter I had left.  They weren�t anxious to do a real rescue if I got into trouble in the harbor.  But now the repairs began. 

            It was while in Ireland that I discovered the extent that the delamination effected the deck hull joint.  I took 100gal through that joint one day when I went aground behind Sherkin Island. Inspired Insanity ended up on her side in a few feet of water given the 20� tides there.  It was a godsend in the end.   I rebuilt that joint on the inside of the boat grinding the entire length of the hull inside and filling it with epoxy and biaxial cloth to prevent water from coming in but I knew water was still getting into the joint from the outside.  The fix wasn�t structural enough either.  A friend had made some stainless knees to help support the rail where the jib tracks laid on top.  I left Ireland with patched up sails, hull, radio, steering vane with a newly inspired desire to go longer offshore, to NZ.  I left Aug 24^th.   We hit a huge storm, 45�seas and force 11, west of the Biscayne, a real eye opener for me. By the time I made it to the jumping off point in the Cape Verdes Islands, 28 days later. I knew the boat wasn�t ready for the Southern Ocean.  I headed back to the Carib and finally RI to do the last refit before actually setting off to sail half way around the world non-stop to NZ.

The deck hull joint on a SC 28 incorporates a 4� tall scupper the full length of the boat.  The actual joining is the flat top of the scupper where the deck and hull meet at a right angle. The jib track is laid on top of this 2� wide over-hang covered with a �� cap rail.  The idea was to get the track as far out as possible but the stresses of the jib sheet against the track are great and had destroyed the integrity of the glass as it flexed continually.  The jury rigged knees made in Ireland to support the rail were already showing stress to the hull where the knees were anchored as the rail was flexing that much.   The hull was delaminated and rotted at the joint edges.  I wanted the fix to reinforce the whole joint so to compensate for the 90deg angle, essentially making it more solid to the scupper and from the scupper to the deck.   After 5 years of contemplating the troubles with this joint, I had decided I really wanted to wrap this whole joint, from the hull, up, around the top and back down the scupper to the deck.  I knew having worked with glass that it was going to be really tricky to get the glass to take the curves. My ex husband came to my rescue.  Taking the project to his shop, he created models and a special set of clamps to allow us to wrap the joint with glass and then use the rail as a mold to encapsulate it. . First, I tore the deck hull apart, putting a grinder through my chin at one point, I have to say, having used the wrong tool for the job I was doing.  The gel coat had to be ground from the deck up the scupper and down the hull about 8�.   My son epoxied the joint together using cloth and thickener in the joint.  Then the complex curves of the deck hull joint were wrapped and saturated with epoxy using tropical slow hardener.  We used 3 separate pieces of 1 ��brazilian cherry, one on top, one outside and one below, clamped to be able to form around the joint, and then bolted through the rail to secure the wood to the glass while it cured.  It is heavy but it is solid as a rock. 

With the help of the original builder, Clark Ryder, I determined that the mast step may have some core issues so I used a floor jack, normally used to secure basement ceilings, under the mast as a compression post.  At that time, Clark told me that the SC 28 was really built as a �coastal� bluewater boat and certainly not to sail the Southern Ocean.  The SC 31 that Pat Henry sailed the world in, was built more for a RTW sail, having a compression post and built with more reinforcement to the deck fittings. 

The rebuild continued with the deck at the stanchions, fiberglassing the rudder and rebuilding the bearings.  I had rebuilt the skeg during the delamination build.  A new Cape Horn Steering vane, Pacific Air wind generator, a new main and a jib designed to withstand the constant high winds of the Southern Ocean, and we were set to go.  I had 2 SSB receivers, a satellite phone, an email set up, and 4 handheld GPS�s, a sextant on board. 

            II took all the abuse of 17,000 miles of gales, knockdowns, floodings and violent days and nights on my way to New Zealand.  When I would get greedy for speed on those great running reach days, I would start to hear the upper deck under the mast creak.  We never averaged more than 5kn and later even slower as I got closer to NZ.  That was one more refit needing to be done. 

            Before I left NZ, I tore the deck apart and rebuilt under the mast step with teak and thickened epoxy.  The last of the deck fittings that could have wet core were dug out.  I even pulled off the decrative teak and the hand rails to fill in the screw areas with epoxy. By this time there were issues with the plywood bulkheads delaminating so they were rebuilt.  And last but not least, on the final shake down sail back up the east coast of NZ, we found that the bow cap had split from the hull. In fact I suspected that this was not new and the hidden leaking that had been dogging my attempts at dry lockers for most of my days with II.  Instead of leaving on Nov 11^th, 2006, I was pulling the bow sprit off and rebuilding the bow.  I averaged a full knot + faster on the legs from NZ to the Carib as the deck never creaked once.

            So all in all, there is no piece of hull on II that has not been rebuilt, but I dare say there is no other sailboat more solid and seaworthy.  The interior and cosmetics have sorely been neglected to structural work.  Yet, she sails like a dream, to wind and with following seas, to 60� seas and day after day for 5 � months at a time, cold and wet.   In the last crossing north from the Carib to RI we took our only roll, going half way over and back up.  I was hand steering and spent that incredibly long 10 seconds underwater, tethered, bracing myself with the dodger frame.  But the rig held.  The structure of the boat was true.

            I have had inquiring emails from other smaller boat owners, other SC owners and I dare say, I would hate to think that my successful rounding would be misleading regarding the preparation and need for alterations in such a boat carrying a skipper with big dreams.  Homework.  Gotta do your homework.  I may have not doted so much on the electronics and gizmos, and she isn�t a craftsman�s masterpiece, but she is solid as a rock and a fine Little Sailing Ship. 

Fairest of Winds and Love

Captain Donna Lange and SV_Inspired Insanity