Boat and Gear

As you can see from the stat’s above she is a moderate lightweight cruiser with a very high ballast ratio. The boat is deceptively fast due to her quite fine lines for her size. Of course the obvious problem is lack of space below compared to more modern cruisers. We picked the boat up in 1991 in Long Beach, Ca of all places after the previous owner had sailed her from England back to the States. In our opinion, we got a great deal on the buy as we were looking for something exactly like this, right down to the tiller steering. Which by the way is the biggest down fall of the design, with a skeg hung rudder, tiller loads get very big the faster you go, in light airs it is a dream thank god for wind vanes. As you can see from the photo of the keel and rudder Breila has a relatively long fin keel which helps her track quite well. It also makes her easy to maneuver in tight quarters. 

Since purchasing Breila in 1991 we have done a lot of alterations to her, some cosmetic, mostly upgrades to systems etc. The list is I think endless, well it will never end put it that way.

One of the main things we wanted to do after returning from the Pacific Cup Race in 1998 was to reinforce the whole bow section. After reading to many stories about boats hitting things at night and having run through the night at speeds in excess of 10 knots, we wanted a watertight bulkhead up forward. We pulled the boat at the end of ’98 and spent a winter grinding and expoxyed up forward. We worked outside and in as this hull was laid up in four pieces and bonded together,  2 hulls a deck and the transom, there are no problems with this system if done well and we had not experienced any problems from it. But yards of carbon fiber and epoxy later we had a great strong and fair hull up forward. It as at the same time we decided to spruce up the interior with a new varnish job and Catharine sanded and applied 5 coats down below. I looked at my gelcoat repairs up forward and unfortunately, it showed up the rest of the hull. So we decided to sand, fill and paint the hull with Sterling Paint. After spraying the primer (any one can master spraying the primer) we rolled and tipped of the two part paint. It is an amazing formulation that just flows out perfectly, as long as the ambient conditions are right. Watch out if they are not, its why we have 5 coats on the starboard side.

I wanted to change out the drive shaft and coupling as the original, still in good shape was metric and the new 2 blade Martec I had bought was not!! We also added a PYI dripless stuffing box, which we have been very happy with, our bilges are now dry most of the time. After pulling the shaft I got down and took a good look at the engine. It’s a 4cylinder 30hop Mitsubishi marinized in Holland, almost the same as the current Westerbeke. It was rotting from the outside in. It ran very well and the thought of $10k to replace it didn’t sit well. So we decided to give it a repaint. We pulled it out, pulled all the ancillary stuff off, plugged every hole and sandblasted it. Then came 4 coats of engine enamel and so far after 2 years we don’t see any rust. The engine compartment is a lot drier now that we don’t have a continuous stream of water flying from the stuffing box. Its still running like a charm, but parts are unfortunately difficult to get on a timely basis.

 After the winter rebuild she was back in the water with oohs and ahhs from everyone on the hull paint job. (We’re saving the deck painting for Mexico) We have completed many other upgrades and I will list them together with our rational for the decisions we made in the coming months.

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