When we bought Windbird, one of the things we liked about her was that she had so many of the systems we needed already installed. She came equipped with wind vane steering, autopilot, full instruments, radar, life raft, ham radio, radio modem, water maker, air conditioning, 110 AC and engine driven refrigeration, etc. Despite all this gear (sometimes because of it) we still had a lot of work to do.
Windbird was a 19 year old boat when we bought her. She had been outfitted and cruised from Los Angeles to Ft. Lauderdale and lived aboard for several years there. The survey showed her in very good condition with a few exceptions: she had some blistering on the bottom, her engine had low compression in a couple of her four cylinders, the dodger was trash, and the sails were old (but still in pretty god shape). While delivering her to New Hampshire from Ft. Lauderdale, we discovered a number of other things we needed to address. The engine could not run at very high RPM's without overheating, the Hood furler on the Yankee fell apart, the inner forestay broke due to the way the boom was mounted to it, and the instruments looked like vintage World War II and worked only sporadically.
So we developed a list of repairs and improvements we intended to make. We had the bottom shaved and laid up multiple barrier coats on it. We replaced the instruments, had the engine rebuilt, bought new cockpit canvas, replaced the staysail boom with a roller furler, bought a new furler for the headsail, and bought new sails, new radio modem, new DC refrigeration system, and a new storm anchor.
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