Some three months into the renovation of Seascape our Warrior 40 formally known as Ocean Flame III .
I have decided as a local record to start recording progress online in a format that we can use to keep track of what we are up to and to keep some record.
The timing might be a bit retrospective as we are now three months in, but let's see if we can fill out the gaps!
Pre purchase and Search
Having considered a wide range of boats and having watched the internet for some time we tripped over a Warrior 40 for sale at Shamrock. A lot of boat for the money and with a vendor willing to negotiate it was worth a look.
Here are the details from the
broker
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| On the Itchen |
Just departing Shamrock for our sea trial pre survey, yes fender is on the way in for stowing!
Photo taken by Tom as we motored by his back window at Ocean Village.
The Sea Trial had a couple of objectives, firstly to see how manoeuvrable she was in astern and secondly to see how stable she was in shallow draft as the keel is only 5 ft 6 deep and we had hear that Warriors could roll a bit.
So having reached Southampton Water Brian and Alan asked us what we wanted to do and so despite I being a force 4 I asked for full sail to be hoisted. This gave us the opportunity to see how the rig balanced and her response in a gusty environment.
Well despite moaning a bit about the over canvassing the Warrior did impress when over pressed she asked only to ease up slowly, the rudder never lost grip and she would track in a straight line without constant helming.
At a point around midday we had some squally gusts and on one particular gust we dipped the rails and ordinarily we would have already tucked in a reef.
The test was a success so we returned to Shamrock Quay to find that the pub that advertised food all day who offered us menus did not serve food after all as the chef was conspicuously absent.
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| 30 knots for a sea trial! |
In discussions over a pint we found out more about Ocean Flame III and the Go Sailing Association ex British Gas Sailing who owned her from new including an online video of her being built at Trident Marine in Fareham in 1996
Youtube
video
After some consideration an offer was made and accepted and the process began of adapting Ocean Flame III into Seascape
The process of buying was made much more pleasurable through dealing with Brian and Alan of Go Sailing and John Rodriguez the broker, top fellows all, thank you!
Why Seascape?
A name to replace Ocean Flame III proved to be tricky, there were long lists and short lists and never any agreement, one thing was clear - a boat name with Flame in it was a superstitious no-no despite its appropriateness for British Gas and the association wished to retain the option anyway.
We would have liked to have continued the theme from Stargazer, but could not find an agreeable successor.
As we wanted to take her abroad long term we could not register on SSR and so part 1 registration required a name to be unique in its entirety. So Scud Bucket would have to be Scud Bucket 8 of Southampton.
The register does not provide support in selecting names, other than telling you when a name is not unique so we had to it in a number of options which were - Seascape, Starscape, and a number of others with an option of adding "Of Southampton" to the name to make it unique.
Fortunately after submitting various forms we managed to achieve our first choice Seascape in plain form it is meaningful and for those cynics amongst us you could imagine sea escape but who would do that?
