Aliisa Specs

I hate things all fiction… there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

-Letter to John Murray from Venice, 2 April 1817; in L. A. Marchand (ed.) Byron's Letters and Journals vol. 5 (1976)-

Inventory

A few people have asked me about Aliisa and what kind of equipment I have and so on. Fair questions. So I thought I put in a page laying out the hard data of yacht Aliisa. It was hard and as you can see, I managed to sway away from the data, eventually.

Bill Erich working on my yacht. Well, on his yacht, Tin Tack. 14 years later I bought it and named her Aliisa. Thank you Bill. The work was done well.

There are many ways of presenting a list of mundane information. I have chosen the simple division that affects you and me in every way in our lives; the haves and have-nots. In the next three sections below, the first will present the facts of the sailing yacht Aliisa. The second will detail the gear that I have, in addition to what I have already listed as part of the yacht. The last one lists the gear that I don't have.

Why do I want to specifically tell you what I don't have? I don't know. Maybe I'm proud of not having a sponsor to pay for my gear? Maybe I want your sympathy? Maybe I just want to put things in perspective? It would be unfair to turn your attention to things that I have without pointing out the things that are commonly found in cruising yachts but not in Aliisa. (I'm not going to list a helipad in my not-haves)

In my mind, I like the last reason for listing the not-haves. I like the word "perspective", the true understanding of the relative importance of things; a sense of proportion, as Oxford Dictionary defines it.

Back to the point...here's all the possible technical stuff that I can think of, regarding the vessel that has been my home since 1998.

Sailing Yacht Aliisa

Design: John Pugh "Moonwind"
32 feet / 9,75m of steel hull, put together by Bill Erich in some backyard in 1983/4
Hard chine hull, two bottom chines 4mm plate, the rest, including the decks, 3mm plate.
A 10 meter mast, one set of spreaders.
A 3 meter beam
I think she weighs 7 tonnes. I've never found a scale to weigh her. Thats more in pounds, by the way. I'm fully metric. Sorry.
Full length keel with a ballast of lead and steel punchings set in concrete
Freshwater tanks under the forepeak bunks, 2 x 150 litres. That's 300 litres all up. 4 x 20 litre containers on deck.
Fuel, that's diesel, in the keel, presumably 260 litres. 4 x 20 litre containers on deck. Man, you should see the deck, full of stuff!!!
Powered mostly by wind and occasionally by a 36hp three-cylinder Yanmar spinning a 1 1/8 inch s/s shaft and an 18 inch fixed blade (3) prop with a 12 inch pitch. (Shit! Looks like I'm not fully metric after all!) The engine drinks about 1,5 litres per hour, is noisy and is bolted on steel beams in the larger-than-my-life-engine room.
Gearbox, I think the lump of metal just behind the engine, is a 2,61:1 ratio, mechanical.
Stainless (304) rigging, 8mm cap shrouds, 8mm single backstay, 6mm lower shrouds and twin forestays, also 6mm.
Windows are 6mm Lexen polycarbonate fixed from the outside with double sided glazing tape and Dow Corning 791 construction sealant, no screws or bolts. (=no rust)
Wheel steering with a 10mm s/s chain and 8mm s/s wire turning the steering pedestal located under the aft cabin bed.
Detachable baby-stay, or inner forestay, whatever you want to call it, 4mm s/s wire. Not quite a cutter rig but the storm jib on the inner stay is good in windward work too.
Enough Ground tackle: 2 x 35lb CQR anchors in a s/s bracket on the bow, though one of them is so rusty I'm afraid to kick it in case it turns to dust. 1 x Admiralty 25lb, 1 x Admiralty 45lb, 1 x Danfors 35lb. Some sort of a canvass sea anchor (drogue) and a car tyre for the same job.
75m of 10mm (3/8) short-link chain for the main anchor, 10m of the same for the Danfors and five meters of 10mm long-link for the others.
Manual anchor windlass, a lump of alloy. Muscle power works well. The galvanised steel pipe works the gypsy but only takes in 1,5 links of chain per pump. Pathetic!

I've got so much shit I don't know what to do with it

The gear that I have:

GPS. One mounted above the chart table and a hand-held as a back-up.
Depth Sounder. A 20-year-old box, the kind that spins a little led-light around its dial. Works in shallow water only.
Autopilot. Autohelm 2000, new. It's ok, though I haven't been impressed by its behaviour in rolly seas. The kind of worker you can't be bothered to sack but wouldn't rave about either.
Compass. Of course. It helps keeping a steady course, even with a unknown error of 20 or so degrees to an unknown direction.
VHF. Yep. One above the chart table and a small hand-held Garmin for ship-to-shore babble.
Solarpanels. 4 x 60W panels mounted on a frame above the back-deck. Connected to a high-tech BP Solar regulator that shows strange symbols and flashes a light that I hope will never turn red. (It has, a few times in the past...)
Batteries. 3 x 105Ah deep cycle and 1 x 70Ah starter. Enough to see us through the night as long as the sun shines into the solarpanels again the next day.
Toilet. Kinda bowl that you sit on. Pumps all the shit, manually, into the sea. That's where all the fish shit too..
Stereo. A cheap car tape player which incredibly still works. Two speakers in the forepeak bulkhead pointing to the saloon, another two in the cockpit, covered in rust. A four-year-old portable CD-player with a tape adapter transfers the music form those shiny CDs through the tape player and out the speakers. The most important piece of equipment onboard. Without it, I would lose my mind. That's worse than dying.
Fridge. Yeaah, baby. This is the ultimate luxury to us. Cold beer, butter and fresh vegetables. Self-built box, poorly insulated and driven by a 12V Danfors compressor, pumping the old R12 freon around newly installed copper pipes.
Dinghy. Well, I have two. A 2,6m Zodiac rollable with an inflatabe floor that only leaks a little. Oh, and a fairly new Yamaha 4hp four-stroke outboard. And a tiny 1,9m plastic tub that is stable enough to carry two people in calm water and one in a small chop. The outboard would sink it, so little Anna is for rowing only.
A laptop computer. Three-year-old Toshiba. Plays DVD's for entertainment and runs a Cmap World for navigation. I use it mostly for writing and doing this website.
HF Radio. Yes, the latest addition to my gear, finally! It is a 21-year-old Kenwood TS-430S which I bought from another yacht in Chagos, April 2005. I pulled a 6mm electrical wire up the mast for an antenna and it seems to work just fine. Wanna talk? Just e-mail me with the frequenzy and time.
Pactor IIe radio modem for e-mails. Another deal made in Chagos. Yes, space age has entered Aliisa.
Company. Paula. Makes me happy. Drives me nuts. Can't live with'em. Can't live without'em.

The gear that I don't have

Radar.
Log.
Shower.
Hot water.
Liferaft.
Original charts.
Water maker.

Back to that perspective...

There are over 22 million refugees on this planet, today, now, right now as you read this. The definition of a refugee? Any uprooted, homeless, involuntary migrant who has crossed a frontier and no longer possesses the protection of his former government. (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Those frontier-crossing people are not seeking new experiences to expand their mind and write about it on the web. They are looking for food and shelter. Think about it for a moment; twenty-two million human beings.
Zambia has 30% more arable land per person than Finland. Why is Zambia's life expectancy only 36,9 years, less than half of that of Finns? Isn't food, grown in arable land, supposed to keep us alive?
The population of 27 countries in the world have a life expectancy of less than 50 years. 25 of them are in Africa. (The other two are Cambodia and Afghanistan)
Approximately 40 000 children, yes, little innocent human children, die of hunger and hunger related disease every day. Yep. Every fucking day. Today. Tomorrow. And so on.
But what do we care? As long as we can buy that Costa Rican coffee cheap, as long as some kid in China keeps making us cheap fabrics, as long as petrol is cheap, as long as they produce coco in Somalia, as long as the chips with our Big Mac are hot and crispy. We might give a few dollars one day for a charity, to help those poor bastards. But we will, and our government will, fiercly protect our way of life. The standard of living that we have earned for ourselves. The lifestyle that we are entitled to?

I'm sitting in this seemingly modest tub of steel, listening to my favourite music and pouring myself another shot of duty-free scotch, wondering how my 5000 euros will last for another 17 months. (The average Zimbwawean seems to live with that amount for ten years, and there are more than 50 countries poorer than Zimbabwe...)

I am probably in the very lower end of cruisers when it comes to financial resources and style of cruising. Man, that really makes me a hero, doesn't it? Does it really matter what I have and what I don't have? I have shitloads of stuff. For the life that I live, I am one of the richest persons on the planet. There you go. If you really read this page, you not only know what I have and not have, but what you have and what you don't have.