Top ten tips for a boat restoration project

Almost a year and a half ago I bought an old steel trawler on a whim. I wasn’t looking for a boat to buy, I just saw it and fell in love with the look of it. After a few brief phone calls I was standing on deck for an inspection, bringing my prime skill to the table: my ability to convince myself of anything I want to believe. In this case it was that nothing is as bad as it looks and that the asking price is reasonable. Probably the only thing I did right at that early stage was bring a friend with me to handle the intensely awkward and emotionally-painful task of haggling. This was the first example of outsourcing certain tasks to specialists, which I highly recommend and something we’ll talk about more later. So, what have I learnt from this project? Well, here are my top ten tips!

TIP #1: Be prepared to walk away.

Get it slipped for an out of water inspection? No! I’m going to buy it anyway so why not put that money towards much needed repairs instead? A friend once said to me, “There is nothing more expensive than something you just have to have.” The friend who came with me on haggling duties had recently bought an old trawler of his own. He bought the tenth one he looked at and the fourth one that he had surveyed out of the water. The money he spent on inspecting the boats he didn’t buy returned dividends beyond anything I could have understood at the beginning of this project. A $2000 survey inspection, on 3 or 4 bad boats can save you $30,000 and 3-6 months of your life. I had the joy of finding all the rust holes and the complete lack of anodes after the boat was mine. The truth is that there aren’t that many good boats ripe for restoration so be prepared for it to take a while to find the right one. Patience is your friend.

TIP #2: Find somewhere suitable to work on the boat before you buy it.

If you need to work on the boat out of the water for even a day or two you are going to need a suitable space. If you ask around you never know whether you know someone who knows someone who has a patch of land you can rent for the right price. Working on boats, particularly steel boats is loud and dusty. Make sure that you are going to be able to do the work you need to do without restrictions. Boat yards are predictably the most expensive option, can have great facilities, but they can also be the most restrictive. Polish that bit of stainless? Sure, be my guest. Grind out that bit of rust? Don’t even think about it.

TIP #3: Work with what you are good at.

People often ask which material is best for boat building. Steel rusts and gets electrolysis but is a very repairable material. Wood rots, but has charm, warmth (physically and emotionally) and beams, ribs and planks can be replaced. Fibreglass on the other hand is durable and relatively easy to work with — there is a reason there are so many fibreglass boats around. The most important thing though is to work with the material you are most comfortable and skilled with. If you are a boiler maker by trade, buying a steel boat makes sense, if you are a carpenter, well, you get the idea.

TIP #4: Buy the best boat you can afford.

The person who poured their heart, soul and cash into the boat before you bought it sadly (for them) won’t get their time or money back and that’s time and money you don’t have to put into the boat. A boat in perfect condition has put you 12 months ahead, that’s all. It will need slipping and antifouling, anodes etc next year anyway. Don’t rate that too highly, look beneath the skin. Don’t get me wrong though, clear regular maintenance means the anodes and paint have probably never been let go which is most definitely a good thing. At a certain point in the market you’ll get up to boats that are currently seaworthy instead of dead hulks in the water waiting for that dreamer to come along and there is every chance they will turn out to be cheaper to restore in the long run.

TIP #5: Keep the boat usable as much as you can.

If the boat is running, try to keep it running as much as you can. Obviously you need to take your time to fix things properly, it may be on the hard stand for quite a while, but a working boat is motivating and enjoyable. The trick here is not to take your foot off the pedal just because it is usable. A boat is never finished. Things need replacing, improving and maintaining all the time.

TIP #6: Only things you personally want have value.

Don’t over value the things that come with the boat, particularly if you don’t really want them. Yes, you want a GPS, but do you want that GPS? On paper my trawler had, sonar, GPS and radar. Pretty much all of it was rubbish. The new Raymarine Axiom Pro I installed replaced all of those things in one full-colour flat screen and does everything better. I may as well have bought a boat that had none of those things and saved myself the effort of removing them. And trust me, the old-school steel-encased sonar transducer wasn’t easy to remove. Different items may be in good condition and be expensive to buy, but if you don’t want or need them you don’t want to be paying for them. You may be able to sell them, but how quickly? with how much effort? and for how much, realistically?

TIP #7: Be realistic about your budget.

It doesn’t matter how much work you plan to do yourself, restoring an old boat is going to cost a lot. There is an old saying that things will cost twice as much as you expect and take twice as long. Rubbish. It’s much closer to 20 times on both accounts. Okay, the more experience you have the more realistic your initial assessment will be, but as a first timer I just couldn’t begin to fathom just what this project would take. At the start I thought that out of water inspection I didn’t do would be a quarter of the total budget. In hindsight it would have been about 2%. The real point here is to be realistic so you don’t become the next person in the line selling the boat for much less than you have put into it. You are better off not starting if the maths shows you just can’t afford to finish it. You can have a lot of fun in a four metre runabout. Stay within your budget and boating will be a dream, step outside it and it will become a nightmare.

TIP #8: Know when to stop.

Everything on the boat can be improved, and usually at great expense. The reality is though that we all have limited time, money and energy. Learn how to find the sweet spot of good enough: not perfect, not dangerously half-baked. When you get to the finish line you can always go back and improve the thing you are least happy with after using the boat for a while.

TIP #9: Consider a partner.

Restoring a boat is hard and lonely and expensive work. Seriously think about a partner in crime. Yes, it can add complications, but sharing the load can be a really good thing. Think Alix and Steve from Acorn to Arabella. Different skill sets, same enthusiasm. There are loads of technical jobs where a person to bounce ideas off goes a long way and there are plenty of boring jobs where it is great to have someone to share the load with. Yes, you can get friends in to help from time to time, maybe, but in my experience if people aren’t a part of the project directly they are going to have better things to be doing than grinding away in your bilge. It’s also good to have a shoulder to cry on, because there will be plenty of moments when you’ll need that! You see the enormity of the task ahead of you, you’ll realise some parts of the boat are much worse than you thought. Moaning to a friend outside the project is one thing, sharing the load with a partner equally committed to the project is another thing altogether.

TIP #10: Do as much as you can yourself, but use specialists when it makes sense.

The concept of sweat equity is really what we are banking on when we do up an old boat ourselves. Using the time we aren’t out earning money to save ourselves money. There will come several points though where a part of the job is either too technical (think rebuilding the engine), too labourious without the right equipment (think sandblasting a steel hull) that it just makes sense to bring in an expert, and you won’t regret it. It will cost, yes, but it will be done right first time and you can move on to the next job that you can do yourself. Be careful though, sometimes you will do a better job than a professional because you care. Choose your contractors carefully! So, not an exhaustive list, but certainly the main ten things I learnt along the way of restoring Renko. There will be long hard days, stressful set backs, aches and pains, doubts (lots of doubts!) but at the end of the day it is just a boat. Don’t lose sight of that or the other things that are important in your life. Take that day off when you need it, it will still be there tomorrow. Focus on the immediate task at hand (how to eat an elephant, anyone?) but let yourself dream about that first fishing trip out in the bay. Because with a lot of commitment, it can happen and it will be a glorious day when it does.