Circumnavigation Equipment

[boatpride]

The distinction between needed and necessary is a good place to start. On the one hand you need safety equipment, first aid and a liferaft. On the other you shouldn't clutter the boat with stuff.

I've written a few lists of equipment that will help you. If you pop over to

http://www.boatpride.com/boating-safety-equipment.html

and

http://www.boatpride.com/boating-safety.html

you'll see useful pointer that should help determine what to bear in mind.

Best Wishes with your circumnavigation.

Chris
________

[sasfish]

If I may, add my two cents here. There are many books written about this. I think, a can do attitude is the first thing needed. You could get your paper work in order (boat papers) make many copies of each. Next could be country flags, Baja filter, oil filters, charts, Spare set of rigging ready to go, Good lock for tender, spares could go on and on so use your own judgment. As far as money go’s, we spent about $ 75,000 a year but we did use Marinas and went out to dinner and never went without wine. Having said that we did try to watch our spending.
Start setting out some goals as far as distance and passages you feel happy with. Charts are needed of course and there are many places out there to source. Layout a few stops in countries that will be easy to affect repairs and costs are low. Most of all remember its just a lot of day sails in a row.
You will get tiered of being away from home. You will get sick, you will see poverty, and you will look at a island beach and say, look it’s just a naughtier island beach but you will also have the time of your life and see things that will blow your mind.
After 23 years of sailing all over the globe I still love it. My trip around has slowed and now I sail around Australia with my two young boys and wife. Have a great trip and we look forward to seeing you on the down under run. Hope this helps although I think it just brings up more questions.

[sv pacific pearl]

Think about it this way.

What do you need to take to be safe. My list has freshwater at the top. A strong dry boat and solid provisions. I also have a great sextant and
GPS. These are well before the liferaft

What do you need to have to make life enjoyable. Remember, the more things you screw/bolt to the boat the more things you need to fix in exotic ports. The things to fun ratio is personal but this is where many overspend - wihin they saved the money for the trip.

When i bought my boat, I filled 23 wheelie bins with stuff and left it on the wharf. The boat floated 4 inches higher. This is a 25 tonne boat so thats a lot of stuff.

Think long and hard about how you will sustain the functionality of anything you buy when you are away and don't fall into the trap of filling the boat with spares for things that make you comfortable. Fix these things when you get to comfortable ports

See you then

[SV_Pegasus]

A lodestone, a wet finger and a book of prayer.

[Great_Aardvark]

The point about fresh water is a good one. Although the HC 33s have about 90 gallons of water you may want to have a water maker also. Also if you don't do a water maker (or even if you do) have some plastic pieces that you can deploy quickly to catch rain water.

After water of course food is next and there storage capacity of the HC 33 should take care of this easily. The food choices should have small amounts that require water such as noodles, condensed soups are OK because you are able to "drink" the water as part of the soup.

Another area is power. Although you do not need power, Slocum and the Pardeys did not, it is nice to have. The time you spend running you engine to charge your batteries is less fuel you have to move the boat. I am restoring a 1984 HC 33 and as part of this I am improving the systems with the intent of trans ocean trips. My goal is to have the ability to generate all of my power requirements from only a windmill (and if needed a solar panel). To do this I am replacing all of the light fixtures (interior and exterior) with LED lighting. Every piece of electronic equipment I compare the power consumption and buy the one with the lowest consumption (unless it does not perform to my requirements).

In one of the other responses I saw the recommendation to read some books. This is a good idea. Also those on the forum (there are many) who are doing long range cruising are another good source. Also thinking is good. I spend a good deal of time thinking about what can happen, what will I need if it does, and how can I avoid it if possible. If you have an HC33 then the biggest part is done, finding the right boat.

Tony

[clonjers]

we wern't sure if there were things we needed or not, so we brought some stuff that we found we didn't need (stuff still new in the box), and were always able to find someone to sell the stuff too.

[bruadair]

There is a lot of good information here already and while I would love to write more my access to the internet is limited for the time being.

For now though there is one piece of equipment that I think should be added to every cruising boat these days and that is an unlocked cell phone. Prepaid sim cards from various cell phone providers can be had in almost any country for just a couple bucks. Put this into an unlocked phone, add a few minutes and you have a very convenient way to stay in touch locally and internationally.

Here in Panama a sim card for Digical is $3 and from Cable & Wireless about $2. We use which ever has the best signal strength depending where we are. From Panama we can call the states for 11 cents per minute and the phone also gives us the ability to call and receive calls from local businesses and friends that do not have vhf radios. When we go to Colombia we put in a Comcel sim card and so on. When I go back to the states the roaming is expensive at about $3 a minute but I can still stay in touch with David via text messages at 25 cents per message. Having your own unlocked cell phone means you can stay in touch in almost every country you visit.

The same goes with unlocked modem sticks for internet access. This allows us to use the cell phone provider's internet services on a prepaid basis. Here in Panama we are currently using Digicel which is EDGE service and only $5 a week for unlimited service. It's a nice way of staying connected in most of the places we visit.

When looking at prepaid phones there are a few things to keep in mind. Different parts of the world use different bands (frequencies). A quad band phone will work in just about every country and give you GRMS and EDGE service internet (not fast, but not real slow either). 3G service is where one needs to pay attention to the bands. In central and south America 3G service is usually 850 or 900. Other parts of the world will be 1700, 1900 or 2100. If you purchase a phone that has coverage on 800, 1700 and 1900 it will not work for 3g service if the country supports only 900, it will however work on non-3g service so you're okay there.

There are several phones on Amazon that are unlocked with quad band 3g capabilities, currently Nokia is the only one that has penta (5) band capabilities. So be sure to check what bands the phone covers against what is used in the countries you think you'll visit before you buy.

By the way, cell phones are available inexpensively in most countries, in Panama Digicel has one for $10 and works quite well. Before we purchased an unlocked phone we had one from each country we visited. That's a lot of phones that we finally got rid of!