Thank Annie,

I still get little thrill l when you respond to something of mine. How do you feel about being a Junk Celebrity?! (ha ha, made myself laugh). I'm such a fan of yours, with my copy of VOASI being well-thumbed, and re-read almost as often as my copy of The Long Way.

I have imagined bridge deck modifications to my cockpit, which would also include a small footwell that slopes aft and drains out of the transom. The current long footwell slopes forward and needs two large through-hulls to drain, and all through-hulls make me nervous. If I did it right I could end up with a nice wide double berth, sort of a widened pilot berth.

Like Fantail, my Magpie has a big egg-shaped hole type of hatch, and no sliding hatch. So in my case if I made a bridge deck at seat height, the hatch would shrink considerably. So I don't think it's doable without also cutting a sliding hatch into the cabin top. Otherwise I'd have to crawl out of the boat like a snake.

When I first got the cruising bug, the third book I read was VOASI. I dearly wanted to build my own boat, in fact a MacNaughton design like Maddog has done (she's magnificent, by the way).

But I had just re-trained for a new career (at age 36) as an accountant, and whatever way I crunched the numbers, they always came out on the side of buying rather than building. When one counts the hours spent building, even ignoring the rising costs of materials, then with a decent salary it makes much more sense to simply work hard and save, then buy later.

Anyhow, as you so rightly said, one simply has to make decisions and do what seems most right, and get on with it.

I read and re-read your article on Fantail's conversion and it was inspiring. In fact your article can be considered to indirectly be the reason I re-joined the JRA. I read the article, emailed David Tyler, who said he MIGHT be willing to help me design a rig IF I was a JRA member. Good advice it was too. He drew me up a nice little planform to get me started.

With my conversion I'm just taking it one step at a time. It looks to me that the hardest part is the mast; getting a mast and fitting it to the boat. Having devoured every word of this website, all of Arne's writings, re-read my copy of PJR and the Van Loan book, I've come down on the side of making a bi-conical hollow wooden mast, octagonally. Once made, I have a reasonable price from a local composite manufacturer to put four to six layers of carbon fibre outside my wooden 'plug' as it were.

Should come out comparable in price to an aluminium flagpole, buy a lot less noisy. Best price I have for a flagpole is $3,500 AUD plus freight from Brisbane to Melbourne, but Graham's complaints about the noise of his rig has put me off aluminium. My boat is plastic, it just seems right to me to go with a similar material.

In for a penny in for a pound, that's the decision I've made, rightly or wrongly, and I'll keep the JRA posted.

I'm minding a friend's house for the next eight months, so the boat is coming out of the water. While i realise the junk conversion can be done with her in the water, it is in fact cheaper for me to have her out of the water. The marina i was living in was $800 per month, but the yard I'm going to use charges $250 per month. It's an hour's drive away though, but I can't have everything.

And most importantly, I found a yard where my furry best friend (my bitch!) is allowed to roam free. Long live the poorly-run amateur boat club! Not a polo shirt in sight, that goodness.

Matt, I can imagine how hard it must be to find a boat you can stand up in with your height.  At 5ft 1in, headroom is the last thing I worry about!

Why not built a nice plywood bridgedeck/locker into your cockpit.  I did it as to  part of my washboard conversion and am rapt with it: not only did it reduce the size of the foot well, but it gave me an extra locker and somewhere to use as a table if eating or drinking in the cockpit.

The grass may seem to be greener, but you can rarely be certain that it will be. One thing I have found in a life full of incident is that you never know when you've made the right decision, only when you've made the wrong one.  And even these often lead to your ending up in a wonderful situation which you only got to by way of your 'wrong' decision.  But there are always other choices you could have made and you will never know how they would have turned out.

I converted Fantail to junk rig while she was still in the water; it cost me considerably less than $10,000 and I think with care, frugality and shrewd shopping around it should be feasible to do it for about $5000.  But you might need a bit of luck thrown in, too :-)

I wish you the best of luck with your conversion.  And remember - there are lots of people in your position so a well-sorted junk-rigged boat is a very saleable item.

Hi Matt, sorry about misspelling your name - I must have been thinking of Tom Waits.  I hope you can sing better than him (though I do like his raspy voice).  Glad to hear your project is still on track.  It is human nature to ruminate about other possibilities - the road not taken holds endless fascination.  I think the Compass 28 has great potential as a minimalist ocean cruiser.  Once you have completed the rig conversion you can start sailing the boat and adding cruising gear as and when you decide you need it and can afford it.  A good wind vane, an autopilot for motoring or motorsailing, some solar panels, perhaps a wind generator, GPS and AIS and first class anchoring gear.  Things like dodgers, awnings, leecloths etc will slip in there too.  It takes a lot to set up a daysailing boat for comfortable ocean cruising but you can do it bit by bit, while you are having fun sorting out your newly converted junk rig. 

The salient point here is that converting your boat is probably the only realistic option for getting what you want, in this part of the world anyway.  If you were in Europe perhaps you could find a walk on/sail away junk-rigged boat but the odds are you'd still have to do a lot of work to customise her.  And if you didn't, you'd be paying a lot for her.  I think the trick is to try and enjoy the process, focus on getting each task right and not fret about how long it might be taking.  Stop and admire your progress to date.  If your dog wags his tail you must be doing it right!

Once you finish, as has been recently stated on this website, you can begin doing maintenance!  I was up my mast yesterday changing the double halyard block at the masthead for two singles, having being advised that this would assist with the lead of the various parts.  Just a few last minute tasks and I hope to be away on Monday 23rd, heading for the Sandy Straits and points north.  I'm still feeling a bit frail but pleased with the work I have achieved and a bit more confident I can hang in there for a while longer.

I look forward to hearing of your progress and if I can assist with any information I'd be happy to do so.

I listed the boat with a friend who was working as a broker in Sydney (he's gone off traveling now) when I was really sick earlier this year.  It is still on their website but I am not trying too hard.  If I sold Arion I might buy a small fibreglass fin keeled high performance boat for inshore sailing.  Less maintenance than steel and more fun for daysailing, though I am not enthusiastic about another rig conversion project.  Arion is a wonderful blue water boat, but maintaining steel is a lot of work and I suspect I wont be up for it in a decade or so.  But in a week or so I am off for a short coastal cruise north up the Great Barrier Reef, so we'll see how things go.  The chances of selling Arion are pretty low as the market is in a big slump, and the chances of finding a suitable junk rigged boat in Australia are also pretty low, so I think Arion and I will be mooching along together for a while yet.

Matt Waites wrote a post elsewhere wondering about whether he should convert his boat or try to buy an existing junk-rigged vessel, if he could find one.  It certainly is a big project converting a boat.  I started in 2011 and have now sailed some 2000 miles along the east coast of Australia and the rig is still evolving.  There are also a few things I'd do differently, mostly have a vertical mast instead of Arion's forward raking one, as it does not seem to suit the Arne type of cambered HM sail I have.  If I ever build another sail I will also make the yard the same length as the battens.  Either the short yard or the forward rake of the mast gives me excessive negative stagger.  I've resolved it by using Paul Fay type luff parrels at the cost of added friction.  I can make the battens stagger positively by pulling on the throat hauling parrel as the sail comes down but it would be easy to get in a tangle on a dark night without the Paul Fay parrels.  With them, I still keep tension on the running parrels as the sail comes down but the amount is not critical.

If you choose to buy an existing junk-rigged boat you'll want to be sure it has been set up properly and that you are not inheriting someone else's mistakes, possibly finding yourself with a major project anyway.  It is a good thing Matt can't see Arion at the moment, with the refit almost complete, new portholes and gleaming deck paint, new webbing parrels and two single blocks at the masthead replacing the double block which had minor issues with the lead of the tail down to the deck.  The boat looks like a million dollars and I should be back out at sea in a couple of weeks. (Astonishing really, given that I was almost unable to dress myself three months ago!) 

I have had the boat on the market for $30,000 for a few months but have not had one enquiry.  That poses another problem for Matt.  It may be hard to sell your current boat anyway.  If you bought an alloy mast from someone like Federation Flagpoles in Adelaide and sewed your own sail and built your own mast step and partners (easy in epoxy and glass), you could do the basic conversion for less than $10,000 over a few months part-time work (allow another few months at least for fine tuning).  You could do a lot of the work afloat in a marina berth with any luck.  If you want a commercially-built sail you'll have to add $2000-$3000 to the budget.  It is a lot of work, and a bit daunting for people who don't have major boatbuilding skills, but actually a lot of the work is simple and straightforward.  If you don't build your own mast, building the step and partners will be your biggest job but if you are comfortable with working with plywood, epoxy and fibreglass cloth, it is quite basic work.

Anyway, I understand your dream of stepping into a going concern.  For those of us who are a bit technically-challenged, or who take little pleasure in construction projects, it is a good way to go if you can swing it.  I converted Arion because it seemed the only way to get from A to B.  And I still have all three of my thumbs!