1. Get the free yacht

This is the easy part. Wooden Boat magazine has a “Free Boats” section in every issue. Any harbormaster can show you some free boats. They’re especially plentiful in the northeast in the fall. Divorce season, whenever that is, produces lots of project boats that “must be removed from my yard before such-and-such a date.”

My friend Patrick and I got the beauty seen in Figure A from the “free” section of craigslist.com.

2. Rent a marina slip

That’s where you’ll put your new boat. Our slip costs $200 a month because it’s a 30-foot slip. Our bowsprit is a lot of that length. We could saw it off to save some rent, but it’s a great thing to ride on. Some marinas don’t allow wooden boats because they don’t like beauty or suffering. Or boats older than ten years, or worth less than 40 grand, or some-such because they worship Moloch. We found the Emeryville Marina, which is a righteous place.

On the project page to this Instructable, you’ll find the application we filled out to get into the marina. It requires insurance, which in turn asks what marina the boat is in: Catch-22.

3. Get insurance

To rent a marina slip, you need insurance. Get whatever the marina requires or recommends. The following companies wouldn’t sell us a policy because the boat was too old: Geico, West Marine, BoatUS, United Marine Underwriters. Progressive Insurance progressivedirect.com) did it online, with no hassles. Yay! It costs about $300 a year. I’m told hagerty.com is also good for insuring weird old boats, cars, etc.

4. Get it ready to move

We swam around the boat with spatulas and brushes, scraping off all the seafood that was thriving on the bottom. When we were done, the boat sat an inch or so higher in the water. The diesel engine runs great, but the RUBBER exhaust hose leaked and had to be replaced. There’s a pump that sprays water into the exhaust pipe, cooling the hot gas just as it hits the rubber hose going out the back of the boat. That’s apparently the usual way of doing it. We went to West Marine and bought a new one. The sticker said “$7.71” and I thought that was very reasonable. We also got some flares that the Coast Guard, the DMV, or some-such requires. The price on the hose turned out to be PER FOOT. $85.00 got us a rubber hose and four highway flares.

Definition of boat: “A hole in the water into which you pour money.”

5. To be continued…

Continued at: Maiden Voyage of the Free Yacht (www.instructables.com/id/Maiden-Voyage-of-theFree-Yacht).

Tim Anderson co-founded zcorp.com, manufacturer of 3D printers that are computer-controlled machines that build sculptures. He travels looking for minimum-consumption technologies developed by poor people. He writes the “Heirloom Technology” column for MAKE magazine and has written 150+ Instructables.

This Instructable was only the beginning of a grand adventure, and eight Instructables, chapters in an amazing saga of high-sea adventure, many repairs and improvements, a fire, how to give away a free yacht, how to get another free one, and lots more. There’s a good book in here, which may be why Tim has come to calling each of these Instructables “chapters.” Links to each successive Instructable can be found at the end of the previous one.