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Hi Joe,
I haven’t posted it on YachtWorld yet. Hopefully before this day is done. Anyway, the full specs & some photos (I’ll be adding more) are already online at http://www.silverheels.us .
Many grand new adventures, I hope! When I bought Silverheels I said she was, and prepared her to be, a 10-year dream boat for me, my longest ever. Honest to Neptune, Bob, she has been everything I’d hoped and a lot more.
Now, for another month or so, she’s sitting just an overnight sail from the gateway to the South Pacific, aching for some adventurous soul to take her out there! But it ain’t me, babe. My bucket list overfloweth and I’m chompin’ to get on with it.
I dunno’, Alan. Buy an old boat and fix it up, maybe?
Just kidding. I’ve got a bucket list as long as my wake, and a little less time to do it all than there used to be. A small RV for more mountain forest time in the Northwest, for sure. Maybe find a rough-&-ready retired fishing trawler to buy up around Seattle and chug it up to Alaska via the inside passage for a couple of summers, and/or/then a canal boat for an inside look at Europe and the British Isles. That’s another couple of summers, easy. In between, some light-pack trekking to new, exotic places all over the planet and, who knows, maybe a funky outrigger to cruise around Micronesia for a while.
I still love Silverheels, but I’m totally Caribbeaned out. It just ain’t what it used to be, or else I ain’t. I’ve run out of places to take this good old ketch that aren’t 10,000 miles away.
Silverheels is everything I say she is on the listing web page, and then some. Tell all your wanna-be friends! Their clocks are ticking, too.
Tor
Gordon Lightfoot named my boat for me. Dan. He’s the Canadian folk singer most famous for his ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” but he also wrote & recorded a lesser-known song titled “Christian Island,” a tune that has been with me since my early sailing days. In it he sings:
Tall and strong she dips and reels
I call her Silverheels
And she tells me how she feels
Sheâs a good old boat and sheâll stay afloat
Through the toughest gale and keep smilinâ
But for one more day she would like to stay
In the lee of Christian IslandI imagine “Silverheels” refers to the sparkling trail left by a boat moving through bioluminescent water at night, or maybe to the play of moonlight on a ship’s wake at sea. I just always liked the feel of that song. It begins,
I’m sailing down the summer wind
I got whiskers on my chin
And I like the mood I’m in…Even though I hadn’t heard the tune for many years, the first time I saw this boat (who didn’t have a proper name; probably never did), something clicked in my mind and I just thought, “Silverheels!” Later I learned that the (real life) native American actor who played The Lone Ranger’s Indian sidekick, Tonto, in the old television series was named Jay Silverheels. He was a pretty cool character in the show, and a rugged, self-made man in real life. He might’ve inspired my boat’s name if Lightfoot hadn’t beat him to it.
Chuck, that was brilliant advice. You must be a surveyor yourself. I was a yacht broker/dealer for 10 years (in 2 shifts) and saw with the whole spectrum of marine surveyors; the good, the bad and the downright worthless.
Not that this will help most buyers – that advice comes at the end – but I managed to do it differently when I bought my 424. I was actually the co-broker on the deal, representing myself as the buyer. The seller’s broker was an old friend of mine from our delivery skipper days and knew it was safe to give me the companionway lock combination so I could inspect the boat myself (and save him an hour’s drive each way to let me in). The boat was on the hard in a boat yard way out in the boondocks, Indiantown Marina in central Florida, and the seller was someplace else.
Since there was nothing in the purchase/sale agreement that limited how many hours the buyer could spend inspecting and surveying the boat, I settled in for the week not far from the yard. Every day for 5 days I spent all day crawling through the boat inch by inch. I’m not a professional surveyor, but I’ve been messing around with boats my whole life and knew I could do a better job of it than a lot of them I’d dealt with. As it turned out, what I lack in credentials I more than made up for with hours spent. I consulted checklists from half a dozen of the best surveyors I knew, and even managed to rent a moisture meter from a local surveyor. By the end of the week I had something like 8 pages of “issues” I’d found in this worthy old ketch, and an estimate of what it would cost to rectify them.
Long story short, the seller eventually accepted my substantially adjusted offer. IMHO, we both got a fair deal. He got free of a boat he had long since stopped caring for, and I got a boat that needed a lot of refurbishing, but for a price that allowed me to do it all. Most importantly, I knew every inch of this good old boat before I even owned her. The only “surprise” was how long it all took to bring her up to my standard, but as it turned out that wasn’t a bad thing. I thoroughly enjoyed the process.
The next 2-1/2 years in a boat yard is now history. The refit list, which I continued thru 2013, is online at http://www.silverheels.us/refit.htm . It never ends, of course, but I’ve been cruising Silverheels since 2009, so it was all in a good cause.
I don’t advise anyone to do what I did. The best way I know to find the best surveyor in any given area is to call every yacht broker you can find and ask them who they would hire to survey a boat they were going to buy for themselves. They know who the best guys are in their region, and since you’re not a customer they have no motivation to steer you towards an “easy” surveyor. However, you don’t necessarily want to hire the local “deal-killer.” There are some surveyors who are just plain negative and turn every issue into a disaster, scaring buyers away from what is in fact a decent boat. The local brokers know who’s who. Ask them.
Reef early,
Tor
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Silverheels/424#17
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I agree with Bob. The boat info won’t change except when ownership (and then maybe the boat’s name) change. That doesn’t require complicated, almost guaranteed problematic interactive capability.
Regarding that database, as I suggested once before, I think it should include the boat’s year. I know you can figure that out from the hull ID number, but stating it early on in a boat’s information list would probably be easier to read and of general interest.
Tor
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Silverheels/424#17
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We may well have co-brokered together, Jack. I remember working with Deaton Yachts on at least one occasion. My last company was Anchor Yachts in Rhode Island, the Northeast Valiant Yachts dealership at the time. I’m definitely glad to be cruising again instead of manning a desk 7 days a week, but sometimes I kind of miss the energy of it – and the commissions ;). The guy who took it over from me, Josh Hodgson, has made Anchor Yachts the #1 Outbound dealer now, plus several other pricey lines.
Tor
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Hopefully not too stupid, Jack, since I’ve done the same thing whenever my Shaft-Lok was out of order. Hey, it works.
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Ah, so that was you, Rich. Well done!
I also seem to recall that a number of owners who have opted to bypass the RV20’s internal water-cooling system altogether reported long-term success. Also, I think some switched to heavier oil, which (they said) had the added benefit of quieting the beast down a little.
I shipped my RV20 to the factory a few years ago for a rebuild when it started making scary noises. It has been running like a top since, including the flow-thru water cooling.
Tor
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I seem to recall another 424 owner here repairing his leaky V-drive water jacket with epoxy.
Tor
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Silverheels 424#17
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Ben,
I still use the original 20″ 3-blade prop, but had it re-pitched (twice) when I re-powered to get it right: 20LH11 = 20″ dia., left-hand, 11″ pitch. It’s excellent, but of course it creates some drag when sailing.
I agree with your assessment of free-wheeling. Early on I installed a Shaft-Lok, which is the only mechanism I know of for dealing with this. When it works, it’s great, but I’ve had a lot of problems with mine, including any parts replacements over the years and one total replacement of the whole unit several years ago. The owner of the little mom-&-pop Shaft-Lok company, a former cruiser himself, is very, very helpful and a super-nice guy. He insists my troubles with my Shaft-Lok are extremely unusual, even unique, and I’m inclined to believe him. It’s possible my installation isn’t true. I don’t know.
The Shaft-Lok installation is a bit of a chore. You’ll probably want to attach it to the jack-shaft (between the transmission and the V-drive), as I did, as opposed to the prop shaft, which is too hard to reach for maintenance, etc. I cut a small access panel in the cabin sole above my Shaft-Lok to facilitate installation and maintenance. You can check them out, and costs, at their website. It’s a lot less expensive than a Max-Prop.
Tor
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