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Free Ascent the Resurrection
In 2005, after some years without a cruising yacht, I bought a 34ft (10.5m) steel yacht that seemed to have good bones but hadn't been out sailing for a few years. The hull and motor were good but the interior fitout was very amateurish. Managing to negotiate a good price , I was then presented with a fix-up task which ended up being a major resurrection when I decided to make it a "real" cruising yacht. This video documents the initial "resurrection" and the subsequent re-design of the sails and rig to balance the boat better and provide multiple choices for handling weather, especially if single handed operation was required. The choice of the new rig was the old wishbone ketch style, something I first saw when I met Bill Golder in Melbourne back in 1974 after I launched my first cruising yacht Dreamtime. Bill's yacht was about a 45 foot wishbone ketch rigged yacht built in ferro-cement and called Warneta. I met Bill again a couple of years later in the Whitsundays and after a couple of years of cruising life on Warneta he looked much fitter. My own yacht Dreamtime was a 36 footer built in steel but conventionally rigged. So it was an interesting opportunity to try out the wishbone style ketch rig on Free Ascent. However it was rigged in a more modern style without the wishbones booms but still with full self tacking capability, except of course for the main Yankee jib out front. After many years of cruising around the waters of Perth Western Australia, we retired and set off on some proper cruising. From Perth we spent a year getting to Adelaide. where we left Free Ascent for what we thought would be a brief period to take possession of a house in Tasmania. But COVID intervened and it was a year before we could get back to Adelaide to sail Free Ascent over to Port Esperance in Dover, Tasmania.