So it turns out Sailing around the world is not really about sailing

This week represents a huge milestone in our lives. On Friday, we’re scheduled to finish the repairs to our only recently installed cockpit roof, and with that, it will officially be the end of our 4-year refit.

It’s been a long and expensive slog, but it’s been worth it.

We purchased Steel Sapphire in July 2015 for around 40% of the budget we’d originally earmarked for buying and preparing the vessel that was going to take us around the world. So we knew she was a “fixer-upper”.

She’d circumnavigated twice before with different owners, and you could tell! Ostensibly, she was just fine, and at first glance she was more than capable of a circumnavigation. And given that we sailed her 2,500 miles home from Perth to Sydney the month after we bought her, we knew she was basically sound.

But good looks can be deceiving, and during the survey and purchase process, we had already started spotting all the work we’d want to do in order to bring “Steely” back to her former glory.

They never admitted as much, but we’re convinced that the couple we bought her from (who had only purchased her 9 months prior to listing her for sale) had come to realise the scale of the task and decided it was too much for them.

As we sailed back from Perth, we started a spreadsheet listing everything we thought we needed to do. Some of those items were essential for the boat’s safety, performance or reliability, and others were “nice to do” but felt important to us to make Steely into “our” boat.

There were over one hundred entries in the spreadsheet.

We tackled every item on there bar one, which was refurbishing the teak decks. We decided to put that off until we reached Thailand, where they have both the expertise and cheaper labour than can be found in Sydney.

We also found and tackled at least another hundred items over the ensuing months and years, many of which were only uncovered as work commenced on the original list. You can find a brief overview of the major aspects of the refit that were completed before we left Sydney here.

While we were sailing around Sydney and a little further afield, we also decided that we’d like to build a hardtop dodger and bimini for our cockpit, something else that would be much cheaper in Thailand.

So as we departed on our trip, we anticipated spending two months in South East Asia having these two major jobs done. We may have been a little optimistic about the timescales required.

But as previewed in our statistics post, in our first year we spent more time doing boat jobs than we did sailing.

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It’s a fairly ugly picture of where we spent our time in the first year of our circumnavigation.

And the overrun on the big jobs doesn’t entirely explain the sheer amount of boatwork that’s been involved in year one.

So what gives?

Well, it’s a cliché among long-term cruisers that sailing around the world is just “fixing things in exotic places”. And it’s a cliché because it’s true.

Speak to any cruiser about what’s on their job list, and they’ll grimace before launching into a huge list of problems (small, medium and large) that need to be solved. Some of them will be showstoppers, others will be minor annoyances, but no-one will ever have fewer than 20 or 30 items on their list.

Sailing boats involve a huge number of systems, many of which have a finite shelf life due to the harsh environment, and all of which are liable to break several times during their life.

We knew this going in, which is why we spent the 3 years before leaving Sydney conducting the refit of Steely while we still had access to good tradespeople, parts, and most importantly, an income to keep up with the runaway costs.

We felt confident that we had the boat in as good shape (not including the teak decks and new cockpit roof) as she’d ever be in. But what we didn’t know, and couldn’t really anticipate, was just how much ongoing maintenance we would need to undertake on a week-to-week basis.

So, with the benefit of a year’s experience, and some pretty ugly sailing to boatwork ratios, I’ve crunched the numbers, and (of course) pulled a spreadsheet together. If you’re really interested, you can check out the full list in all its gory detail here.

Spoiler alert - it turns out the cliché is true.

So far, we’ve undertaken 142 individual “boat jobs”, ranging from the massive (like the teak decks and cockpit roof) to the tiny (like replacing the zinc anodes in our heat exchangers).

Of those boat jobs, the breakdown is as follows:

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Of course, I’ve got all this stuff in a spreadsheet!

It turns out that we’re averaging 87 hours a month, or over 20 hours per week, on maintenance. It’s hard to know if this is a good figure or a bad one, but it’s probably not what you imagine when you think of us in these far-flung exotic places. Don’t get me wrong - we do enjoy our fair share of sunsets and G&T’s, but we are definitely hoping that the ratio starts to improve.

This coming year will definitely be different, although to what extent, and in what direction, we’re not sure.

On the one hand, since the refit is over, we can remove a big chunk of last year’s hours from the equation. There’s always new ideas we have to change or improve the boat, but none of those are necessary, or even smart at this stage, and we’d much rather just enjoy the boat and go sailing.

On the other hand, as mentioned in my post about self reliance, we’re not going to have access to any contractors in the Indian Ocean, so we will have to do ALL maintenance ourselves (in this past year, we outsourced about a third of the jobs, mostly in the upgrade category).

So who knows which way it will play out?

At times, we’ve really begrudged the amount of time we’re spending on maintenance – especially when we’re redoing work we’ve already paid someone else for.

But we’ve also come to understand that this is the true essence of circumnavigating. The real achievement in making it the whole way around will be to do so without the boat falling apart, and without running out of money and time due to the ongoing repairs.

The sailing is just the thing we do for fun when we have spare time!

This post is one of a series of 10 insights and learnings from the first 12 months of our circumnavigation. Click here to see the full list and access the other posts.