Meet Splash!

So now that we’ve introduced ourselves, it only seems fitting to take some time to introduce our boat, Splash!

Like most of our major life purchases, Brad and I neither shopped around nor planned ahead. We are impulsive people and thankfully, this hasn’t yet totally bitten us in the butts. Ha. When I bought Sprocket I wasn’t really horse shopping and I never thought I wanted a project. When we bought our house, we weren’t really house shopping and we never thought we would live in Nanton. When we bought our boat we weren’t really boat shopping, but… you get the picture! By the time we settled on buying a boat last fall, we had convinced ourselves we would buy a smaller, coastal cruiser that would suit sailing around Vancouver Island. After looking at a few of the smaller, older options though, I realized that I actually do want an electric windlass for our anchor, and I absolutely need hot water and a shower. Ha. Our good friend and mentor Eric walked through a couple boats we liked and sent us extensive videos, and after watching some of his tours of much older boats, I couldn’t help but ask “Okay, but what do they smell like inside?” because some of them just looked musty. Ew. We did really love one little boat, an Ontario 32, called Bandit (the most perfect boat name). It was priced affordably and really well maintained, but it did lack my two must-haves -- hot water and a shower. We also really, really wanted space for friends on board. We love each other’s company but also really love sharing our adventures with our favourite people!

As we do, Brad and I were hiking one weekend in October, and basically managed to talk ourselves into stretching our budget a little (okay, a lot) to purchase a boat that wouldn’t be a starter boat, so to speak, but a boat that we could learn and know inside and out, refit as needed, and use for some serious long distance, ocean crossing adventures in the future. Our search didn’t take us very far -- just down the dock from Eric’s boat was a 1991 Hunter Passage 42 called Lady Kintyre. Brad and I had both seen it in person at the dock and were particularly drawn to two features -- the centre cockpit layout (meaning the helm is centre of the boat instead of aft, creating a more inset, secure cockpit space) and the hugely spacious aft cabin. After doing some research we learned that on one hand you have a group of people who scoff at Hunters for being floating apartments, and another group of people who own Hunters and find them to be great boats for adventuring. We stumbled across a YouTube page called Sailing Jibsea, and we were stoked to see they had the exact model (one year older) of Hunter and had crossed the Atlantic with it twice. Meanwhile, Eric got some history on Lady Kintyre and learned that her first owner bought the boat brand new and sailed down to Mexico before living aboard in Panama for nearly ten years. In 2021, her aging owner sold her to a fellow in Qualicum and despite some big sailing dreams, he never really got her off the dock. With that in mind, the boat came well maintained and thoughtfully equipped for living aboard. Eric did a walk through for us, and the rest is basically history. We totally fell in love and after an entire month of getting numerous surveys done on the systems, she was ours! The biggest perk — we were able to assume moorage at Maple Bay Marina, and be neighbors with Eric and Cheryl!

The name Lady Kintyre wasn’t going to fly, so we opted to rename her. After a lot of debate, we settled on Splash. Short and sweet, because as I mentioned before, I barely know my phonetic alphabet and I didn’t want to be tested on it every time I had to make a call on the VHF radio. Ha.

Now that we’ve owned Splash for three months, we understand the true definition of boat -- it means “bring out another thousand”. Ha! After laying down some serious cash for the surveys and purchase itself, we also had to pay for annual insurance and moorage. Ouch! Of course, after spending some time on board we also have a slew of projects and upgrades. We’ve finally laid out a calendar because it’s pretty tempting to try to smash it all out at once -- new decking, battery and electrical upgrade, tune the dinghy motor, fix the exhaust manifolds, inspect, repair, and replace our sails, replace some tired running rigging, upgrade our anchor, toss the solar panels and replace with new ones… the list seriously goes on and on!

First, Brad is heading to the island in March for a week to tackle our electrical upgrade. We’re tearing out the old lead acid batteries and replacing them with lithium. We didn’t make this decision lightly as it is quite costly; however, the pros to lithium are sure to make the upgrade worthwhile. We hope that coupled with a solid solar install in the future, we can toss our generator and have enough power on board to be off-grid indefinitely. Stay tuned for more on this… I am hoping I can get Brad to document the process so we can follow along!

The real Captain