Project boat form bear hull

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pembrokeshiresailor

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so I'm looking into the various option for a relatively cheap boat to use as a liveaboard but also to sail most weekends. I'm a dinghy sailor looking to moving more into yachts. I have part-owned an Elizabethan 23 for about 4 years and have gathered around 900 miles experience and completed my day skipper ( due to do Yachtmaster but paused due to lockdown). I'm happy to work on a boat to fix up where necessary and have been looking at some options.

I came across an advert for a new ( but bean sat outside for 2 years) hull for a 26ft colvic atlanta, it has no interior finishing and doesn't come with mast, rigging, sails or an engine. but is priced around £1,750. this strikes me as a good option as when finished I feel it would last for longer and (might) hold its value better than a second-hand boat. what are your thoughts? what do you think or would I be better to get a significantly older boat with my budget?

I'm confident I could work on the interior and find masts extra. my budget is around £5,000-£10,000 so if I'm spending so little on the hull I would have money for everything else. any idea on how much a second-hand mast? sails? nav equipment? would be. I'm confident to be able to fit the interior myself for not too much . but are there any other hidden costs you could think of? I also have somewhere to store it whilst working on it on land.

thanks for reading and any thought would be appreciated
 
You’re not going to like this answer but my advice is walk away NOW. Firstly a bare Colvic Atlanta hull is not worth £1750 imho. The sellers are flying a kite with that figure. Even if I could be persuaded that the hull was good value, there is no way on earth you could fit it out with the sort of budget you’ve mentioned.
Go and price up the cost of engine, mast and rigging sails. Your budget won’t even buy these items. Then there are hundreds of other bits you’d need plus marine quality plywood for bulkheads and hundreds of £ of epoxy resin for bonding and proper marine windows and the list goes on and on. A new deck hatch costs several hundred £....

To give you some idea, we just had our (admittedly slightly larger) boat re-rigged with new stainless steel wire rigging and the bill was over £3500. If I’d done all the work myself it might have been £2,500?

And don’t think you can buy second hand everything to save money. With respect you’ll end up with a hotch potch of a mess that is unsaleable. And even at second hand prices you won’t fit it out for your budget. It’ll also take you several years to complete the fit out. (I know because I’ve been there and rebuilt boats).

For £5-10k you can buy a complete boat in reasonable condition.

Some secondary questions.

Where are you going to moor this boat you’re buying when it’s finished l.
Where were you planning on putting it to work on it. (If it’s not inside in a barn or shed treble the time it’ll take you to fit it out. )

One final tip, when working on a boat, however long you think it’s going to take you double or treble it.

Last point. Fitting out a boat so that it’s seaworthy is not straightforward. The skills you need are many and varied. You can do it yourself but it’s good to take lots of advice and ideally have reliable people nearby who can point you in the right direction. When I rebuilt a bare hull, the hull was laid up ashore outside a boat builders workshop. I made friends with them and their advice was invaluable. As I said before, if you’re not careful you’ll end up with something you can’t sell.

I wonder how long the hull has been on the market?
 
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(might) hold its value better than a second-hand boat.
When you try to sell it, it WILL BE a second hand boat .
And as John Morris has said"if you’re not careful you’ll end up with something you can’t sell. "

If you can't sell it, the value is zero.
If you can't sell it and you are paying for a mooring and upkeep, the value is....?
 
There are so many smaller boats on the market, ready to go, at the sort of prices you’re talking about that I’d be looking to buy one of them and going sailing rather than buying a bare shell which will take a couple of years or more to fit out. You won’t save any money by embarking on fitting out a bare hull, it’ll cost you more and there’s a better than even chance it’ll never get finished as you’ll run out of money and the will to complete it.
And don’t forget that the cost of purchase bears no relation to the cost of keeping it! My annual mooring and insurance cost several times what I paid for my Hurley 18...
 
Have a look at this forumites blog to get an idea of what is involved .... he is Roger Ball, username is guardian ... one of the most honest write-ups of rebuilding a small boat I have read.

AGY.COM
www.centaurphotoalbum.com

If you want to effectively build your own boat, have the skills or believe you can acquire them, and building a boat will bring you as much pleasure as sailing it, then go ahead.

It will take far longer and cost far more than you expect, 11K will not go very far at all, especially if you have never done it before and don't have the storage or workshop tools.

Most importantly, be honest with yourself, do a lot of soul searching and decide if you really are the type of person that can take this on and stick at it.

If you don`t want to dedicate the next X years of your life to building a boat and trying to find the time and money to finish it, then the other option would be to buy a sound example and go the sail/upgrade in parallel route. I have done that with my boat, and every year she gets a bit better, but I have all those unforgettable holidays too.
 
also watch sail life on youtube, its taken him years to recore his deck and then refit out the interior at huge cost. as others mentioned get a ready to use boat for £10k but get a survey
 
As many have said walk away unless you want to build boats. Sailing is about getting out on the water.
 
I agree with everything mentioned earlier - for under 10k you can get a fully equipped boat ready to sail, with only minimal updating. Look on ebay where you'll get some idea of boats available. A nice Mirage mk11 for £8950 as an example. A friend has a Contessa 28 for sale at £8750 to give another example. Also look at boatsandoutboards.co.uk
 
I'm with everyone above. Starting with a bare hull these days takes a special kind of lunacy. It isn't a cheap route into sailing, it's an expensive route into getting stuck in a boatyard watching the bills mount up.

You'd get a decent Westerly Centaur for that sort of money. OK, it's the Ford Cortina of sailing, but there's a reason they were and are so popular. Get one with a decent engine and recent standing rigging and your home is sorted. There's an issue with the keels, but that's likely to have been sorted (check!), and headlinings fall down. That's a messy job to sort, but not horrifically expensive like acquiring and fitting an engine, plus all the gubbins to make it work.
 
Just round the corner from me is a house which had a 30 foot boat on its drive while the owner fitted it out. It was there for 27 years before his estate sold it after he died. No doubt when he started he thought it would take him a couple of years.
 
mine was £10k




spent about £8k on top that we will never get back (new rigging, headlining, windows, engine mounts, other engine parts, electrics upgrading, hull repairs.
 
To the OP, if you want a good example of how a bare hull rebuild invariably goes do a forum search for “bought a never splashed Colvic Countess”. That should put you off forever. He’s currently working on a Photon Drive for it but the photons keep escaping from the jam jar he’s collecting them in.
 
Catalina36 said:
Just round the corner from me is a house which had a 30 foot boat on its drive while the owner fitted it out. It was there for 27 years before his estate sold it after he died. No doubt when he started he thought it would take him a couple of years.
Click to expand...
My father bought a hull and deck had it by the side of the house for three years............fifteen years on it was afloat but never got really finished once launched??
 
anoccasionalyachtsman said:
Ah. Fair enuff. Well spotted.
Click to expand...

Presumably the boat does or did exist at that price, though. That scam site is scraping real ads from elsewhere. So the OP might not be able to buy that particular one (it's probably long-since sold on Boatshed or ApolloDuck or wherever) but it's a valid example of what's out there that would be a better bet than the odd-shaped empty tupperware box he currently has his eye on.

Pete
 
prv said:
Presumably the boat does or did exist at that price, though. That scam site is scraping real ads from elsewhere. So the OP might not be able to buy that particular one (it's probably long-since sold on Boatshed or ApolloDuck or wherever) but it's a valid example of what's out there that would be a better bet than the odd-shaped empty tupperware box he currently has his eye on.

Pete
Click to expand...
This is what I'm thinking. All the website owners are doing is building traffic in order to sell the site. The only people who will get scammed are those who buy the site based on non-genuine traffic. One might consider the copyright infringement against the site/s from which the pictures and details have been ripped.

If it was genuine, it would still be dodgy: Chinese auction? You bid on tickets that then go into a raffle.
 
Catalina36 said:
Just round the corner from me is a house which had a 30 foot boat on its drive while the owner fitted it out. It was there for 27 years before his estate sold it after he died. No doubt when he started he thought it would take him a couple of years.
Click to expand...
Not near Goostrey, Cheshire was it by any chance?
I often wondered what happened to that boat I used to pass. There was another one one behind a house on the Buxton to Ashbourne road for years.

There was a long thread similar to this, something like "Bought a never splashed *****".
 
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