Welcome to our home

We've been writing about our home for over a year but most of the discussion has been about places we've been and things we've done. Several folks have asked questions about our boat that we call home so this post discusses our home and goes in to some detail about the improvements and modifications we've done to make the boat suitable for long-term cruising and living.

Our boat is a 2003 Island Packet (IP) 420. The boat is about 45' overall and 14'4" wide. Although it has significant girth, the narrow stern makes it more comfortable in a seaway. One of the incredible features about IP's is that essentially everything inside the boat is living or storage area. As a 45' boat it has as much space inside as a small apartment and surprisingly enough storage to subsist for months without the need to go ashore and the improvements we've made complement those features and add to our capability to be self-sufficient.

Our boat has 3 cabins, 2 heads and a galley. We have the main cabin shown below, the aft cabin shown above and the master suite also shown below. In nautical terminology heads refer to bathrooms. There is 1 in the master suite and 1 off the main cabin and aft cabin. In our aft cabin we have a printer/scanner/copier for personal needs.

The aft head.

The main galley.

Master cabin including the master head in the background. The shower is behind the bulkhead and to the right of the area you see. Forward of the head is another storage area and the anchor locker where we have 300' of chain and 200' of rope rode for our primary anchor and 30' of chain and 250' of rope rode our secondary anchor. We also have a 3rd anchor in one of our cockpit lazarettes with 200' of rope rode.

Looking at our power plants we have a primary means of propulsion as our sails and an auxiliary power plant of a Yanmar 75 hp turbo diesel located behind the galley and under the cockpit.

We have several sources of alternative power for the boat. We have 470 watts of solar power capability and a wind generator that should both be capable of providing enough power through our DC battery bank of 600 amps to run everything on our boat. To supplement the battery charging and provide direct AC power primarily for our HVAC system we have a Northern Lights 3 cylinder 5 kw diesel generator.

Some of the key improvements we made were to add and arch on the stern to support the wind and power installation. We also added the diesel generator. Because the previous owner had few electronics we added a complete suite of navigational electronics including wind, solar, depth, chart plotter and auto-helm. Because of the sailing weight of the outfitted boat we raised the waterline so that the bottom protection would end above where the water actually did to reduce the possibility of damage to the fiberglass. Also to protect the bottom we installed an epoxy barrier coat last year wen we got the boat. We made numerous other enhancements and of course lots of repairs to improve the livability and comfort of the boat. We also added a WIFI booster to facilitate connection and we are looking at satellite options to provide complete access to the internet anywhere in the world. We also affixed an EPIRB and AIS for identification and rescue if necessary.

We have mentioned other features in posts and will be talking about others in future posts.