Hi all,
I know there has been a lot of interest in the FastCats and as a new buyer of the first second hand
FastCat to hit the market, I'll post some of my thoughts and observations here. Feel free to ask any question you might have.
I bought
Hull #1 African Innovation which was up till the moment I bought it Gideon's
boat. He posts frequently on this forum, so most of you have probably encountered him already.
To make a long story short, I had a thread named:
Characteristics of a circumnavigating cat There I asked lot's of questions and received so much helpful input that I was almost overwhelmed. The
core of my thread was a list of features that I set up, which I was looking for in my "ideal"
boat. The cat that by far came closest to fulfilling my list was the
FastCat, but it was way out of my
budget range. I still decided to go and look at them, when I was in
Amsterdam by chance at the beginning of May. It was love at first sight. Two weeks later I returned for a test-sail and the deal was done. It's important to remember that since I'm
buying a used FastCat and not a brand new one, I got her cheaper. Not a lot, because it still blew my
budget to smitherines, but I felt it was worth it. I'm also planning to stay an extra year in
Norway getting her ready and that gives me time to build up more of a cruising kitty. I simply couldn't walk away from her.
I came to
Amsterdam 3 days ago, so about a month after the test-sail. The only thing missing now before I formally take posession of the boat is a successful
survey. We were supposed to do it yesterady, but due to Force 8 winds the travel-lift was unable to
work for
safety reasons. So the
survey has been postponed a week.
You get a good feel for a boat when you live on her.
Cleaning her from top to bottom also reveals a lot of questions and things that you didn't see when you were looking or test-sailing. I can really recommend it ... of course who wants to clean a boat, that they might not buy, from top to bottom? but I say it's well invested time. Anyways, the
cleaning I've done has only revealed minor things: a small leak due to wear and tear on a seal. Dirty clogging some drains, so things overflow. To be honest it's been very minor stuff so far, so I'm proceeding into the survey with a lot of confidence. I'm so confident in fact that I'm contemplating canceling the whole survey.
So like I said now I'm spending my time cleaning up the boat to truly make her shine again. On some boats it takes weeks, months or years to make a boat shine, I'm guesstimating that by the time we do the survey she should be looking very good.
With the cleaning done, I'm going to start installing stuff. 2 new
solar panels,
solar chargers, extra
batteries, a new
wind generator, and a whole bunch of other things that needs to be replaced, fixed or upgraded.
It's a fun process, because I'm getting to know the boat inside out. I'm not in a rush, so I can take my time and do this properly, while living on the boat.
I realize that this post is more of a blog, so I'll probably move it to my blog unless I get questions from people on the forum and then reserve the forum for questions, comments or findings I do while getting African Innovation ready for action.
I might still send an 
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