Hello everyone. My name is Charles Bell and I guess it is time for me to stop lurking and introduce myself. I have been sort of shy in jumping into the trawler list because I view myself as having primarily in the "preparing to go places" category. We are not yet retired. My wife is Kim and we have a 40 foot Marine Trader Europa Sedan that I have been quietly preparing to go on extended coastal cruising. Why we bought it? I do not know for certain, I guess it all starts with a dream. I cannot really say when it came to me. I think that it started as a longing and sort of grew from there. I love to travel. I worked as a consultant for a number of years. Looking back at it I guess that the travel was one of the things that I loved about it. On one of my extended trips I met Kim, who would later become my wife. I began searching the net and in time I found myself coming back to the boats time and again. To my benefit, when I first started looking at boats I was in no position to buy a boat. We had just started a business a year and a half before. Things were going slowly but surely. All I had in the way of boats was my Jet Ski. It was a lot of fun but I did not have the energy to spend a day on it. As I was confined to the net and not reality I started to surf. And surf I did! I of course started out in the "monster motor yacht" frame of mind. I looked at the Sea Rays and Bayliners. Even managed to get out and look at a few of them. While by cashing out the retirement portfolio I could get us into one of them, there would not be a whole lot of money left over for things like retirement. (Which is what I thought the portfolio was for in the first place.) At some point it started to dawn on me that I was tired of my career. I started really looking forward to the day that I could retire. At 28 years of age, 65 looked really far away. Determined not to wait until I was sixty years old and lacking the means to actually buy a monster yacht I decide to live vicariously through the lives of others. While out on the net I begin to look for ship stories. I start to find them as well. After reading through a few dozen ships logs I start to realize a few things. First thing I learn is that few, if any people are trying to go around the world in a Bayliner or SeaRay motor yacht. Almost every log I read has people traveling in either sailboats or trawlers. No one I can find is out there doing this in a Bayliner. Second I realize that the "biggie" of the cruiser world was a circumnavigation of the earth. This sounded to me like a monster feat that was worthy to pinning my dreams upon. I am a goal-oriented guy and I thought I had found a goal. I am stunned to find people sailing around the world not just in half million-dollar yachts but also in 10 and 20 thousand-dollar sailboats and having a blast. A quick check of my bank statement shows me that I could join their ranks by tomorrow morning if I wanted to. I have to admit that the urge was there to bag it all and go. At about this time I began to think about how the admiral would react to such a rash decision. Reality quickly set in and I kept a lid on things. The truth be told I put the whole idea on the shelf and just got back to concentrating on my job. Big things were starting to happen at work and it was time to roll with them. Kim and I got married and we worked at settling in. For a long time we had endless weeks at work where I thought that an eighteen-hour day was a short one. I became a sort of pro fire fighter as we went through on massive change of direction after another. It was no problem for me. I have always been willing to work hard but had never approached the problem as a husband before. I was starting to get a little scared that if I did no do something to make sure we could get together as a family then all we would remember was me going off to work and coming home again. I wish that I could say that my cruising dream started as a bold endeavor to spend time on distant shores. It would be a lie. Our path to the cruising life was backed into one day when I asked my wife if it would be OK for me to spend five or ten thousand dollars on a boat. Something we could use to putter around the Chesapeake Bay and check things out. Our basic requirements for the boat started out really simply: a toilet and a comfortable place for everyone to sleep. Thus began the quest. We went down to several local marinas and looked at a lot of boats in the twenty-foot range. These boats all had a lot in common. They were all a lot smaller on the inside once you got four people in there. Planning on spending the night on one of these boats with four people did not look like it was a really good idea. Most of them also looked pretty beat up. Ratty might be a good word. As I surfed around the world I started to do a lot of detail oriented reading about boats. I cannot strongly enough recommend the web site www.yachtsurvey.com. That man is absolutely brutal but he taught me a lot about boats. One of the big things that he taught me was that gasoline engines in boats are disasters waiting to happen. Fire hazards aside, the gas engines really look like something to get ready to overhaul just after you put them in. I do not want to start an engine holy war here. I just want to make the comment that the diesel engines seem to handle the long-term abuse better than the gas engines. So I found out that I did not want gas engines. I also started to realize that there were no twenty-foot boats with diesel engines in them. I also realized that I wanted to go distance cruising when I was out on the boat. I took a look at some of the eye popping gas burn rates and was not impressed. Finally we were out looking at boats and a Carver 36 aft-cabin was at the marina. Now compared with the boats we had been looking at this boat was absolutely HUGE. Easily three time the size. The price was also in the sixties. And then there was a pair of big honking 454's in the back. In shock that I would actually think about spending that much money on a boat I went back to looking at 400k Bayliners. They were a lot safer for me as there was little danger I would go "that nuts" and actually get one. I went out onto the net yet again and started looking at trawlers. The trawler market is a little bit brutal right now due to the combination of aging baby boomers and the fact that the boat building business in the US did not turn out massive numbers of trawlers in the 1980's. There seem to be few used boats. People with bloated retirement accounts are buying those boats which are out there. Bad combo for the guy like me who is seeking an affordable, slow, unglamorous, but solid old boat. We went to Florida to check out one boat that we thought had great potential but the survey revealed more soft wood than solid. It was a 33 foot Albin aft cabin trawler named Jim's Joy. It was indeed a joy to see and after the survey we were really sad to have to let go of the boat. Back we went to the drawing or board or should I say the web browser. One Sunday afternoon we were surfing through yacht world and I came across and ad for a 40' 1977 Marine Trader Europa Sedan Trawler. It was a rainy day and we had just been through the 33 fiasco in Florida. We were beyond reserved about what we were going to find wrong with this one. We did not want to sit around in the house so we went anyway. At this point I rated myself among some of the most skeptical of boat buyers. I approached this boat with a flashlight in hand fully confident I would find a million reasons not to buy this boat. My first impressions of this boat were of its massive size. This boat was about four times the size of the other boats we had been on. I struggled for three hours to find something wrong with the boat. After failing I gave up and bought the boat. We really like this boat. In fact I really love spending time on the boat. For a long time after I bought the boat I thought of it largely as a sort of a transitional boat. I figured that I would hang onto it for 4 or five years until I sold out our business and then move on to something else for a while. With this in mind I really enjoyed our boat for what I planned on using it for: a good weekend cruiser with more thank enough space inside for us, the kids, and our Great Dane. Even when it rains there is still space for all of us to spread out inside the boat and have a place of our own. Life was good. We enjoyed the boat for what it was. Then to make a long story short things at work changed for the worse. I took a long hard look at the last several years of my career and came to the rapid conclusion that my efforts were unlikely to yield the results I was seeking. There suddenly did not seem to be a huge pot waiting at the end of the rainbow. (It was still there, just smaller.) Suddenly I did not see a whole lot on the table that I thought would justify my present level of misery at work. It not longer was worth so much that I simply could not walk away. While I guess that most people would freak out over taking such a major income loss, I felt the opposite sort of reaction. In time I came upon the realization that I was free. There were no more chains of gold holding me in place and I was free to reassess my entire life. Most everything was lost, so there really was not anything to lose at this point. When you don't really have anything left to lose, suddenly you have nothing left to worry about loosing! Tears of joy would be an understatement. For years I had worked around the clock constantly concerned about my job and career and money. Working under the assumption that if I kept my nose to the grindstone that I would not have to worry about money anymore. Well, hell, here I am at 30 and suddenly by giving up the desire to be a multi-millionaire I find I have far more than I need. I do have to admit that after the sudden turn of financial events I was a little shell shocked for about a week. Then like any other time a plan started to come together in my mind. All those ships logs I had read on the Internet started to come to mind. I realized that if I wanted to I really could go cruising for a few years, using the boat we had with a little careful planning. Let us start by checking out my basic package and building from there. For long range cruising on any sort of a budget you need to have either a trawler or a sailboat. I have a trawler. To go cruising you probably need to have someone look after your house while you are gone. The payments also need to keep happening on your boat. Last of all you need to have the type of career that you can walk away from for a period of time. You can guess how I feel about the career at this point in time. Now a look at the core of this web site: The boat. As I have surfed the net I have been at times a little embarrassed about the brand of my trawler. Marine Trader is not exactly the darling of the trawler industry. In fact they have a really bad reputation just about everywhere I go. Mine has been fully pre-disastered. Everything has broken and then been replaced. I actually think that only the hull is original. While my boat will never be a blue water cruising status symbol I feel confident that she will hold up well as a coastal cruiser for an extended period of time. She is named Bells@Sea and has a number of things going in her favor. Bells@Sea is a very simple boat. A commonly accepted rule of thumb in the cruising world is that simpler things tend to hold up better over time, cost less, and be easier to repair. Our single engine is a 135hp Lehman Ford diesel that has, at the time of this writing, about four hundred hours on it. It was replaced last year. Last time we filled up the tanks we were stunned to find out that we had almost 500 gallons of fuel capacity. We also have a 9kw Koehler/Yanmar diesel generator. My best estimates put us at about two to three gallons an hour on the main while cruising and about three quarts of fuel per hour to feed the generator. Without adding any additional tankage we can go eight-hundred, maybe even a thousand miles without refueling. If I add a couple of fuel bladders in the aft bilge area I can easily add another five-hundred or so miles to our range. Right now we are in the process of grooming the boat for extended cruising. I've been trying to speed up my learning curve by reading the list every day. Projects I currently have in the works for the boat are: 1) Figure out some sort of a get-home motor arrangement that does not cost more than my boat to install. 2) Figure out the fresh water plan. Right now we have 200 gallons of capacity. I am not sure I want to go the time and expense of the watermaker route. 3) Increase the battery bank capacity. 4) Deal with the outboard/dingy storage problem. Determine if we can install a dingy davit or crane 5) Replace the A/C refrigerator and freezer with DC units 6) Learn how to provision 7) Convert galley stove to propane 8) Convert all varnish to Cetol 9) Increase DC charging capacity. Alternator and charger 10) Figure out a cheap way to send/receive e-mail 11) Figure out weather fax & marine radio 12) Put together a spares kit for everything 13) Install a "real" pilots chair on the boat deck 14) Get a 2hp outboard motor, have a 10 right now. Trades anyone? 15) Install a washdown on the fore deck. (Fresh if we do a watermaker) I have probably run on too long in this message. I'll cut it off for today. I'm really interested in meeting with other Chesapeake Bay trawler folks. On water or off to get together and have fun. I will throw up a web site at some point. I have a few thousand electronic pictures of the boat and the systems on it. Thanks all for your support to date. You saved me from buying a planing hull. <Snicker> Charles Bell Bells@Sea 40 MT Europa Sedan