Quote:
Originally Posted by goboatingnow
Maybe but don’t overestimate it. I’ve a friend with a Dutch steel yacht who clipped a rock and a welded seam opened. She sank
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Poor quality assurance can doom any structure to early failure.
The other side of the question is illustrated by one of my mates experiences when he ran onto a reef on a steel Roberts 52 in the Solomon Islands. He was stuck on it for seven weeks until he got two shrimp boats (prawn trawlers) to drag him off, treatment which would destroy most non metal vessels.
Another friend was caught in a
hurricane in an exposed anchorage in the West Indies in his steel Boro Princess. He had to dig a lot of sand out and
rebuild the
engine after he had it dragged back down the beach with a bulldozer and re-floated it but managed to finish his
circumnavigation back to
Australia. His was the only boat in the anchorage which survived.
As a former steel boat owner for about thirty five years the OP has my sympathy for bring obliged to struggle with the
maintenance of a vessel where most of the
maintenance issues were designed into the vessel.
In my own case I eventually cut out all the stringers in the mid portion of the vessel and reinforcing the large
panels thereby created by installing
keel cooling tubes on the outside of the
hull. Whist this partially alleviated the worst of the maintenance issues there were still an amazing number of
water traps built into the hull (It should be a criminal offence to put stringers into a steel boat)
As for the OPs plan to
cruise the
east coast of
Australia and the
South Pacific it's very sensible. I got as far as
Sydney whilst doing a
circumnavigation of Australia from WA and then turned back north twenty years ago and have been cruising mostly the east coast ever since.
This part of the world is a great place to
cruise as you can drink the water out of the taps and unlike WA where you can go 400-500 nm without anything but an anchorage it would be the grossest of flattery to call lousy, there's generally, a half decent anchorage every twenty miles or so and if you are inclined that way you can live your entire life in the 80-110 temperature zone.
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