We sold our first sailboat–a 22′ seafarer–quicker than I thought we would, after I put an ad on Craigslist just to see if I could get more than we paid for it. I could, and it was almost fall, so we decided to sell and see what we could find for next spring. The 1984 Seafarer 22 that we named Falkor was a nice sailboat. It was easy to sail, easy to maintain, simple, trailer-able, and handled the waters of Long Island Sound well. It was my first real foray into sailboats. I had been out on my uncle’s 33-footer once before and got seasick motoring around in the windless fog of the Maine coast. In the 6 years we owned Falkor, I learned a lot about sailing and sailboat maintenance and general boat ownership stuff like mooring permits and dinghy launches. The Seafarer has a roomy cockpit, but the cabin was small and you couldn’t store much or stand up in it. Overnights with two people and our stuff quickly filled up the cabin. It also had a fixed keel, which made it difficult to load onto the trailer at the nearby boat launch. We would have to plan our launch or load around high tide, then disconnect the trailer from the truck. I built an extension out of some steel pipe that we hooked onto the trailer and allowed us to back it in deep enough to float the boat on. It was precarious, and time consuming. We eventually decided to pay the nearby marina to place our boat on the trailer with their travellift and store it in their boatyard for the winter. This added expense, but was much more convenient than the boat ramp.
We did the math after a few years and decided that owning a slightly larger boat without a trailer wouldn’t be much more expensive than our 22-footers annual cost. We decided to look for a boat with ample cockpit space and standing headroom in the cabin.
We wanted a boat that wasn’t too expensive or complicated to maintain so we decided to keep it around 24-28 feet. I liked the look of a traditional early fiberglass boat, so we looked at a Bristol 24, a couple Bristol 27s, and three different Tartan 27s. The older Tartan 27s were nicely built, but the cockpit was relatively small, and the ancient Atomic 4 gasoline inboard looked like a maintenance headache, at least in the boats we looked at. Another one had a nice-running diesel engine that, when motoring along, reminded me of the research trawler I used to work on. An inboard diesel on such a small boat could get pretty loud. I like the idea of an outboard. It’s cheap and easy to maintain and upgrade, and the idea of not having to sleep next to the engine, with its oil and fuel in the bilge really appealed to me.
The two Bristol 27s we looked at were neglected at best. The owners of these boats touted the durability and heavy construction of classic fiberglass boats–but seemed to think that meant they didn’t have to maintain them. One owner told us that “…we’re sailors, not mechanics, and these old boats are built like tanks. This one even broke loose from it’s mooring and washed ashore, but it didn’t damage anything.” Ah, words that inspire confidence in a boat purchase. Coming from a mid-1980’s boat, when the designers started to focus on increasing cabin size, we both thought that the cabins on the Bristol 27 and Tartan 27 were a little small, dark, and cramped for a boat of that size. The small cabin footprint did make for easy walking on the deck, though.
The day we took the diesel-powered Tartan 27 for a test cruise, I noticed a nice classic-looking boat floating on it’s mooring nearby. It looked like it had a roomy cabin, and I could see the outboard tilted up and sticking out of the stern from the motor well. Later, I asked my wife, “did you see that dark blue boat we passed? It looked pretty nice, I wonder what it was.” she noticed it, and she liked the look of it, too. I later found out that it was a Bristol 26, which I had never seen, or had never noticed, anyway. A little later that winter, we found a 1970 Sailstar (later Bristol) 26 for sale in New Bedford, MA. It was in need of some work, but the price was reasonable (cheap), and it came with too many electronics, newer sails, dinghy davits, and boxes of other accessories. It was in the water and sailed regularly, but it was in need of quite a bit of work. I figured that we could use the boat, and pick away at the problems and projects over time. I’ve always believed that you shouldn’t try to do too much of a project at once–Facebook Marketplace is littered with gutted project boats and disassembled project cars that people excitedly tore apart, then lost interest or motivation for over the years. I would take care of the stuff that kept the boat afloat first, then work on the rest later.
The Bristol 26 has a heavy fin keel, a spade rudder, and an outboard motor well. It has a surprisingly large cockpit, and a good-sized cabin, sacrificing the walking space alongside the cabin in the process. The boat had some compromises in it’s design but seemed like it would serve us well. We aren’t planning on living on it or crossing an ocean with it—we just want a nice comfortable boat to cruise around in and relax at our mooring in Pine Island Bay.
I knew it needed a lot of TLC, but it quickly seemed like everything I looked at was broken, corroded, rotten, leaky, or inoperable in some way. The original seacocks were frozen open, the hoses connected to them were brittle (one cracked in my hands when I tried to pull it off the fitting!), and clamps were rusted and some were missing. The original toilet’s hoses were old and made the v-berth smell like a waste treatment plant, the cushions weren’t cusion-y anymore, the wiring mostly worked but was a rat’s nest of additions, and most of it was in the bilge (a great place for wiring). There were two tiller-mounted autopilots, but neither worked. The hand pump faucet didn’t work. One of the LED running lights was full of water.
One day, soon after we bought the boat, I sat next to the wobbly dinette table and watched the late winter rain through the crazed acrylic windows ringed with yellowed silicone. I watched the rainwater running down the (maybe original) standing rigging, down the pitted chromed bronze turnbuckles, down onto the chainplates and down past the globs of silicone into the cabin, dripping down off the rotten chainplate knee and disappearing into the two layers of moldy outdoor carpeting to soak into the waterlogged plywood shelf below. I had wanted an older project boat for some reason. Well, we definitely got one.
The Bristol 26 doesn’t get much representation on the internet, so I’ve decided to document some of my projects on the boat and post them for people to read. Check back here for more updates–I’ll be adding new posts about the projects regularly (by “regularly,” I mean every once in a while). Thanks for reading this!