From bare hull to expedition yacht
Richard Rogers and Alice Sanger reconstruct their Morgan Giles 30 for some serious expedition sailing to high latitudes
Refitting a Morgan Giles 30 for cold climate cruising
Out-of-season sailing attracts us. Winter here in Scotland, and early spring, when days are lengthening and the colours returning, are the best times to be outside. In those glorious few weeks when the glens are warming but there’s snow on the summits, we want to sail to remote mountain areas and go ashore.
We also dream of going further afield: Orkney, Shetland or ‘properly north’ to Iceland and Greenland. The Arctic Circle is less than 550 nautical miles from here.
To do this, we need the perfect boat. We agreed that if we were going to take on such a project we’d do it only once. We wanted a boat that could take us across oceans too, if we ever decide to do that. That’s why we bought Aurora, our 30ft Morgan Giles sloop. She was far from perfect, and needed to be completely stripped down and rebuilt (see PBO Summer 2020). Now we need to refit her to suit our dream of exploring colder climes.
Remote sailing
More than anything, sailing in remote places demands as much water and fuel as you can carry. For the cold you need insulation, and a decent hull in case of ice. For places with unreliable charts your underwater profile becomes important, because of what might bump into your rudder.
If you are going to explore mountainous and rocky coasts you also need good upwind sailing ability to get off a lee shore. That might make all the difference to the success of a trip and to the safety of the boat and crew.
Then there’s getting ashore, and how to leave the boat as safe as possible while you do, and when you return there’s the need for some comfort.
Alice has a bottom line when it comes to comfort, and anyway we are coming at this from a mountaineering background. Compared to your average mountaineering tent even a small boat is colossal, so there is no excuse for missing out on comfort!
The west coast of Scotland is our base. We overlook a bay where a dozen local yachts hang out in summer. The local sailing club is lively but mostly about dinghy racing. A few miles down the loch is The Minch, which has a reputation, like the rest of Scotland, for sudden changes in weather.
Cruising grounds up here, in the many sea lochs and out and about the islands, demand more self-sufficiency than most places. More than that, this is challenging coastal sailing. The mountains make and shift the winds as they see fit, the bottom is as rocky as the crags, and anchorages often steep-to or hard to get into.
Finding the perfect expedition yacht
One solution is to buy a 40ft to 50ft aluminium expedition yacht. That’s fine if your finances are up to it. Ours aren’t, so we searched for something smaller and more affordable to adapt. But even that turned out to be unrealistic: there was nothing for sale even half-suitable for what we want to do, so we committed to a rebuild to our own design.
We hesitated, though, because rebuilding anything is a long, long road. Eventually we persuaded ourselves that the advantages would be worth the effort.
There’s the fun and challenge and we will get the boat we want.
We will also know even the darkest corners of Aurora and her systems. How many people buy a boat and spend five years understanding her construction and hidden corners and weaknesses, only to find that too much of it isn’t what they really wanted? You can rebuild a yacht in that time and really, really know it.
Choice of hull
We decided on a 30ft fibreglass yacht, probably a cheap wreck we could start from scratch with. For a long time we’d advocated 36ft as the ideal size, but we dared to go smaller, partly for lower costs but mostly for the adventure.
Aurora is perfect. She had five berths which we are reducing to three. This is all we need when visiting remote places where outside help is limited or nonexistent (two ashore and one with the boat). And taking out the weight and space of two people enables us to add more water and more fuel.
Aurora has a fairly long keel and a heavy displacement which helps in big seas, and is a sloop which gives us good upwind performance. The rudder is hung deep on the back of the keel, nicely protected from following seas and lurking rocks.
She’s tiller-steered, which is something we gave a lot of thought to. We’ve tried to imagine what we’d do if anything broke. Some things you can do without, some you can repair easily or take a spare. The steering, though, is the one thing there is almost no contingency for. The best we can think of is to take a large oar to steer Roman galley-style if we have to, but we’ve never tried it and it doesn’t sound like a great solution. A wheel and emergency tiller was also an option, but that’s quite a bit of space below decks for cables and rods, as well as another large item to stow.
For similar reasons we rejected the idea of a pilothouse boat and the complexity of multiple steering stations and wheels.
Aurora was amazing value, too. Lying abandoned in Brighton Marina she cost just £1,500, which included the services of a rigger to get the mast down and a free lift onto a truck.
Most of her metal components such as traveller, genoa tracks, portlights, pushpit, pulpit, and mast were salvageable. The engine was the exception which, at 10hp, is not powerful enough – and the hatches. Everything made of wood, bar the compression post and some minor bulkheads, was rotted, but we are OK with that. We wanted to change the layout anyway so we decided to remove the entire interior.
Cooking and heating
Gas is nice and easy to use but for Aurora there’s a problem. Butane is no use in the cold, and propane bottles, even the smallest ones, are too big and heavy for this size of boat. The only choice is diesel, for cooking as well as heating.
For cooking we like the look of a Wallas diesel stove. However, they are used in fishing boats more commonly than sailing yachts, to the extent that the gimbals haven’t been made for years. To find a gimbal set we emailed every Wallas distributor globally to see who might have one hidden in the back of a cupboard. We found only two. Ours came from Tasmania by courier. Don’t ask how much it cost!
For heating we have other criteria to consider. On our previous boat, on which we lived year-round for eight years (see PBO November 2019), one of the best things we did was install a towel rail in the heads. It is uncivilised to live with wet
‘For places with unreliable charts your underwater profile becomes important’
towels hanging about, and anyway, in an expedition boat, drying space will be important. On Aurora we want a towel rail and it needs to run on diesel. An Eberspächer water heater looks good for that, and it can also heat the cabin via a fan matrix.
Diesel water heating has two other benefits. Firstly, the unit can preheat the engine before we start it if we go somewhere seriously cold. Secondly, we can have hot water heated independently of the engine: so, for example, in the mornings, without the noise and inefficiency of running the engine just for that. For Alice, hot water in the morning is a condition of sailing: if she can’t wash her hair the design of the boat is a failure.
More water
Sufficient water is absolutely key to Aurora becoming an expedition yacht. Water capacity is the thing that limits our cruising range more than anything. It’s more important than fuel, because if you’re out of fuel you can always sail. Getting somewhere takes longer, but that only highlights the need to carry enough water to make that possible.
The Morgan Giles 30 was designed to carry 95lt of water. But that’s wildly short of what we need. Our water needs are based on the most extreme scenarios we anticipate, which are a two-week expedition for three people, or a long ocean crossing for two.
In either case, and based on advice by Lin and Larry Pardey, we need at least 180lt of fresh water. We can use sea water for most washing and (diluted) for some cooking. If close to shore in the mountains, we can take top-ups of fresh water from streams, or even from floating glacier ice.
We decided not to install a watermaker because of the cost, complexity, space and power consumption. Then there’s reliability: if there’s a chance it won’t work it’s hard to imagine putting ourselves in a position where we would rely on it.
It’s a tight allowance, though, so we decided to build drains in the lowest parts of the deck to collect rainwater, which when not doing that will dump the rain into the cockpit drains and act as scuppers.
Does this sound like enough? It must be. Remember that we have taken out the weight of two crew to allow for the additional weight of more water and more fuel. We are increasing the water capacity from 95lt to 180lt.
More fuel
Similar thinking applies to fuel requirements. The most fuel-hungry scenario for us is out-of-season sailing, where we will need significant heating, and where fuelling stations are a long way apart. To go two weeks we reckon on 140lt of fuel, which is 110lt more than Aurora came tanked with.
If our replacement engine uses one litre per hour, and we deduct something sensible for heating and cooking, that’s 100 hours of motoring, which at five knots is 500 miles. Enough? Again, it must be. If we sail and motor 50% of the time, our range will be 1,000 miles, which sounds great.
To double check the additional weight of water and fuel: additional water is 85lt, additional fuel is 110lt, which is a total of 195lt, or approximately 195kg. That’s the weight of the two crew who will not be sailing because we have removed their bunks, so we are happy with that.
Insulation is key
Insulation is a key idea behind Aurora. It’s the main reason for buying a wreck, taking the interior out and starting again. Fitting insulation around an existing interior sounds very hard to do well.
Roger Taylor fitted up to 20mm of closed-cell sheet foam in his Arctic yacht, Mingming II. Scottish winter, being our worst case, might be harsher than Arctic summer, so we are planning on 30mm where possible.
Closed cell sheet foam is expensive, so for flat surfaces, where it will fit without needing to bend it, Celotex should work well. For ceilings, spray foam is an option: anything else risks getting cooking steam behind it in spaces it can’t escape from, where it will rot whatever is next to it.
Layout changes
Removing two berths makes lots of options available to us. Space previously occupied by the starboard quarter berth can take an ice box aft, which opens into the cockpit seat above. There’s room for an additional fuel tank forward of that, and stowage for shore equipment, tents and the like, forward of that again.
Removal of the starboard saloon berth can make way for a linear galley with enough room for an oven, which is something else we will not do without. When it’s cold, getting something ready in the oven just in time to drop the anchor at the end of the day is one of the best morale boosters there is.
On the port side, space by the companionway – where the galley was previously squeezed in – will become a navigation area. The heads can be enlarged by moving a portside bulkhead aft to the compression post.
Additional water tanks will go under the portside saloon berth, in the heads and under the forward bunk. We will fit a sea water tap to minimise use of fresh water from tanks.
The alterations will make for more modern and capable facilities, particularly for heating, drying, cooking and washing.
We will not be running a fridge, though. They tend to kill the batteries or invite more complexity and cost to solve the power problem, such as more batteries, more wind generators, more solar panels and all the gubbins that go with them. The ice box is out of the way in a cockpit locker and should be fine to store a few days’ fresh food, especially as we’re unlikely to go anywhere hot. And if we do there are always tins.
Other equipment
Many familiar items of equipment will be needed, which are not worth listing.
What is worth noting is our plan for a tender. We don’t like outboard motors much: we feel the small ones are not reliable enough for remote places. A friend of ours successfully used an inflatable kayak instead of a dinghy and outboard in the South Pacific, so we will try that.
Needless to say, there’s a corner of the lazarette set aside for a Jordan drogue. Aurora also came with Aries 2 self-steering gear, which is currently in our garden waiting for a rebuild.
Of course, redesigning a yacht is one thing, building it is another. We reckon we are more than half way there, but there is still much to do to get Aurora in the water. And then we need to sail her home to Scotland from the yard in Essex!