As most of you know, Morgan’s Cloud is for sale. But, of course, with COVID it’s difficult for potential buyers to see her here in Nova Scotia, so I have shot some videos of her interior arrangement and equipment.
I won’t kid you, these videos are primarily to help sell the boat. That said, I do go into a lot of detail—some might say mind numbing—on the gear we have installed and the reasons we have done things the way we have, based on 29 years and over 100,000 miles of voyaging.
So the videos will also help anyone fitting out a boat for offshore voyaging, particularly to remote places where reliability is vital—we have only had one significant failure (broken intermediate shroud), and we have never cut short a cruise or had to wait for parts or tools to fix a problem.
Sorry About This
By the way, should you feel that you are, in effect, paying an AAC membership to be subjected to a hard sell for our boat, we hear you. In a perfect world all of this would be in addition to our normal content and that was indeed our original intention.
However, getting the boat ready to sell has consumed far more of our time and energy than we expected, and that, along with some other factors I won’t burden you with, has resulted in me being way behind on writing.
So please cut us some slack over the next three weeks while we get the rest of these videos shot and edited, the boat hauled, and the AAC year end done, and we will make it up to you later in fall—we have lots of interesting stuff perking.
The videos are imbedded below and I have also provided links to in-depth articles that I mention.
Engine Room
Show notes:
- How to decide if you need a generator
- More on alternator installation
- Sizing chargers on a boat with a generator
- Why we have the house bank split in two
- Our crash pump
- Why we chose the 87 HP Perkins M92B
- More on that decision
- Installing the M92B, the details
- Much more on the care of an aluminum boat
- PVC Pipe
Work Bench and Batteries
No show notes for this one.
Chart Table
Show Notes:
- Working from the boat
- SSB Radio or Iridium
- Setting up AIS person overboard alarms right
- Why the Mac Air is the best Windows computer
- Hart tank tender
- Victron battery monitor system
- Much more on the care of an aluminum boat
- More thoughts on fire fighting
Further Reading
- Much more on Morgan’s Cloud
- The reasons we are selling
- Effect of selling on the future of AAC (none)
Comments
If you have a question about anything in the videos, and the links above don’t answer it, please leave a comment here, not on YouTube.
And if you want to make suggestions on how I can improve my video skills, feel free, but understand that I’m a writer and still photographer with exactly zero ambition to become the next S/V Delos, not to speak of no talent nor rippling muscles, so don’t be offended if I don’t show a lot of interest.
Disclaimer
We believe the information above, and the linked videos and articles, to be correct; however, we do not warrant that the information is in fact accurate and further make no warranty, express or implied, of the yacht’s fitness for any task.
Furthermore, the owner makes clear that responsibility to insure the correctness of this, or any other documents or videos provided to a prospective buyer by the owner or his agents, lies entirely with said prospective buyer.
And, further, the owner specifically recommends that a prospective buyer investigate all specifications and condition of the vessel and her gear, to in all ways assure themselves of the vessel’s suitability for their intended use.
Cool.
Ralph
Hi John,
Don’t underestimate interest in this video series. 🙂 While I’m not a prospective buyer, I appreciate all the details purely for their educational benefit. Rarely does one find such a thorough tour, and even more rarely on an offshore boat, let alone one that has been refined and adjusted over decades of use.
It’s great to see the level of care and craftsmanship you’ve put into Morgan’s Cloud. She’s a remarkable and well tempered machine.
Scott
Atlanta, GA
Hi Scott,
Thanks for the encouragement and kind words, much appreciated, particularly since I still have another two hours of raw footage to edit down!
Only halfway through these videos, but as often as I say how much I learn through your example about preparedness, organization and spares/tools, it’s nice to see I came to your conclusions independently in some cases. That diesel stabilization stuff was recommended to me in Toronto and I recognized the brand immediately, and when you said “what good is a spare prop without a prop puller?”, I flashed on mine in the forepeak workshop (our boat’s a lot smaller and I don’t have a passageway midships to put the bench surface).
If I can get the owner of East River Shipyard out of a post-turkey coma today, we’ll tie off there to haul our mast and then the boat for the winter, and so I may wander past MC in a few hours, which will close some sort of circle for me since I joined up here. Then I have to cycle back to Deep Cove, which is doing wonders for my aerobic fitness.
I really hesitated opening these videos since I knew they would show an immaculate, well-maintained boat and remind me in no uncertain terms how far I have to go. Oh well, I couldn’t resist and although it did exactly what I feared, it was also full of good ideas and well worth seeing. Thanks so much for sharing.
Hi Blake,
Thanks for the kind words. A point that may make you feel better about your to do list is that it took as 29 years to get to this point, and we are still making improvements. But, we still went cruising the first year we had the boat and all but three years since. The key is buying a fundamentally decent boat and then prioritization of the important stuff.
We have a complete online book on just that: https://www.morganscloud.com/category/rants-and-musings/online-book-cruising/