Martin: For me, the story of CHANCE began already in France in August 2009 when Lindsey and I had the idea to purchase a sailboat. Sailboats were cheap with the recession – damn cheap actually – so it seemed the right moment to buy a boat!
My friend Philippe had just recently bought a little sailboat down on the Mediterranean coast – a small, but roomy boat named MANDARINE. We were invited on a little sailing trip in August – we sailed from Port Saint Louis to Porquerolles and then back to Marseille. I could see that Lindsey enjoyed sailing – that definitively made me happy! I have been sailing since my childhood, but never actually owned a boat… actually that’s not entirely true – I owned a small sailboat in California once which I had bought for only 650 US$ – but that’s another story. I always thought about having a sailboat again – but there was no need to buy one in France: slip fees are too expensive and so are used sailboats. But owning a boat in California is a completely different story: a slip in Eureka is really inexpensive and boats are insanely cheap at the moment. There was also another benefit to owning a boat over there: we could live aboard and use the boat as our home – instead of paying expensive rents. We also do have a dream that is the circumnavigation of the Pacific Ocean… and California is the best place to start such a voyage one day!
Well, decision taken, we started the search for a suitable boat. The best deals were on “Craigslist” on the internet. We found a number of interesting boats during the week we intensively searched the net from France – but we also noticed, that these boats disappeared quickly… sold! We were obviously not the only ones on the hunt for a boat.
Arrived in California beginning of September, we started our research instantly – I was sure, that finding a boat takes time – and sailing it north against winds, waves and currents from the bay area or from LA would certainly not be a piece of cake… (remark: if I had known what sailing north along the Californian coast really means…). We had a deadline: end of September I had a flight to Costa Rica – back to work on a “real ship”.
….Mathew, the owner of CHANCE, seemed to be a really nice guy. I don’t know why, but I had a feeling that it was worth to abandon all boat-search down in LA for this boat – I had the feeling that we had found “our boat”. So did Lindsey. One more call about technical details, and we packed our stuff and off we drove – north – leaving the big city behind. We were obviously the first to call him for CHANCE, and he promised to send us some more information about his boat and Albergs in general. She is more than just a traditional beauty – she simply looks gorgeous! I always liked traditional long keel boats – for their great seaworthiness and for their generally gentle behavior in head-on seas. Traditional long keel boats are also often well built, heavily reinforced and they just look great – much better than any modern sailboat can ever look! The boat was not the size we had originally looked at (we had originally looked at boats around 35 ft long) and it did not seem to have all a lot of living space. But I knew that Lindsey did not have exorbitant “space requirements” and that she feels even better in a small cabin, boat or tent than in any large house – and I myself just love traditional sailboats – so I started to get all excited about CHANCE.
….There she was: CHANCE. Soon our CHANCE, I was sure! The boat looked wonderful! She had lines like a gracious model! She was simply beautiful and she looked well maintained from the outside. So I did not even ask to see the interior, but told Mathew already “we’ll take her”.
I was not really keen on waiting another week until we could take off to sail north, because time was against us, and the weather would probably just get worse with the autumn approaching. I had heard stories, that the Northern Californian coast isn’t a pleasant coast to sail – especially northbound. But finally we had more than enough work on the boat – so we didn’t really “wait”. There was actually more work to do than I really liked… the more I started “digging” the more problems I found that needed urgent attention before our departure:
The toilet system was leaking and the pump did not really work well. We dismantled the pump and found out that the membrane was gone. The hoses of the toilet system had totally “grown close” over time. We had to replace the pump and all the hoses to get rid of the “stink”. I put in an electric macerator pump and Lindsey cleaned the toilet and all the valves on the dock – two days of work. Then we found dozens of cables without “function”, the water tank leaking and many more things to repair. We worked day and night against time and saw our bank accounts getting seriously drained. We were regular customers at the local West Marine Store where we spent hours to find spare parts.
I also installed a Humminbird fishfinder for only 90$ – which proved to be our most reliable piece of equipment during the trip… together with my little handheld Garmin GPS. We fixed the leaking water tank and cleaned out the boat many times.
Time flew bye! It was wonderful to see how many animals lived in the bay – at night fish jumped – hunted by pelicans or by the harbor seals – and it was a pleasure to watch the seals swim around at night in the lit-up harbor basin close to the gate and the bridge that led down to the floating docks. Works advanced – and I decided to have a closer look at the rigging as well in order to be sure everything was ready for an ocean passage. I built lazy jacks and prepared the reef system. I also changed the boom-vang system and a few other things related to the rigging. We scheduled a test-sailing-trip into the bay with Mathew, but that trip did never happen, because the winds were howling, rain was pouring down on us and in an attempt to hoist the storm jib, the jib-halyard broke. Mathew was really motivated to sail and he was so brave to climb up the mast to check if the broken halyard wasn’t still sticking out the top of the mast. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case – and meanwhile it was getting dark anyways and the rain kept getting heavier by the minute… what an unusual weather for September in San Francisco (Lindsey had promised me that it never rains in California in September!). Tired and hungry we went to Mathew’s favorite Indian restaurant – and got stuffed, warm and dry again.
The next day, Lindsey climbed up the mast like a real squirrel – only using ropes – impressing me with her climbing skills acquired climbing redwood trees. She took some awesome photos of the boat and of Sausalito from up there and fixed the halyard and the toplight which was broken too.
Finally, the boat was ready and the weather beautiful – and we started the engine and left the marina for our first test-sailing with Mathew. The Atomic 4 motor seemed to run fine, it squirted out a little bit of water from its exhaust pipe and after a few minutes we hoisted the sails. All of a sudden, we smelled a smell of burning rubber from the port lazarette where the exhaust pipe passed. Mathew had told me, that there was a problem that he had recently discovered – but in my head, I had put engine problems into another far-away сторидж space. We stopped the engine instantly and Mathew dismantled the exhaust hose which was already completely burned. We had a spare pipe of the same size and although we were not sure whether this was an exhaust hose or not, we installed it. While the boys were working, Lindsey had to take the tiller and sail out into the bay. She did great! I have rarely ever seen someone who learns to steer a boat so quickly. I could hardly believe it. There is hardly anything, that Lindsey wouldn’t learn speedy – even steering a boat… She surprises me every day!
When the wind started to die down, we ran the engine again. It started well, but died down minutes later – making a weird coughing noise. Oh shit! The replacement exhaust hose wasn’t an exhaust hose – just some rubber hose – and it was blown up like a balloon. It was getting dark and we were without engine. With the dying wind, we tacked back to Richardson Bay. It was getting dicey when we got closer to the Marina and the fairway gets very narrow and the wind was literally non-existent any more. We used the fishfinder to navigate – as close as possible to the shallow edges of the channel. With the last breath of wind, we made it into the Marina and moored the boat on the shit-pump-out dock. There was no chance to make it to our box-slip.
Another day of repairs. My nerves were seriously getting stretched – just like my bank account. At the engine shop “List Marine”, they told me, that I should check the exhaust elbow of the engine – where the cooling water of the engine is injected into the exhaust. If the elbow gets rusty, the engine gets no more cooling – and the exhaust pipes overheat, because they are not water-cooled any more. Of course the elbow was rusty and the cooling water outlet completely blocked. The water that we saw squirting out the back came from a bypass that some genius had built into the system. However that bypass didn’t save the engine from overheating, nor did it save the rubber exhaust hoses from melting or the fiberglass muffler from cracking with the heat. I repaired the muffler and replaced the entire exhaust system of the big old beast as we called the Atomic 4 engine now. The whole story started to remind me of “The Boat that Wouldn’t Float” – a book that Lindsey had been reading… I just hoped that we wouldn’t have the bad luck that this poor owner of this little sailboat had. I was starting to think that “CHANCE” might not be the right name for our new sailboat. But then I couldn’t stop thinking about something: if we would make it successfully and happily to Eureka with this boat – and Lindsey and I would make it without wear and tear – without any serious dispute… then this adventure would be a test for life – then maybe we were really made for each other… Lindsey and I and our CHANCE 
The exhaust elbow and pipes were ridiculously expensive – 300 $ for some piece of metal… not even “steel” only cast iron! The guys at List Marine were really nice – they didn’t charge us the labor and gave us a nice discount too… still 300 was a lot of money – especially considering we had a trip in front of us, the slip in Eureka to pay for, a rental car to pay so that we could drive back down to San Francisco to pick up the red squirrel car after the trip and many things more… and I had almost an empty bank account by now!
Tuesday we finished the engine repair and did a big shopping trip to Safeway and “bunkered” provisions. Wednesday morning we did last purchases – “real” wine glasses, nautical charts for the trip, gasoline for the boat and we met Mathew one last time in town and checked the weather on the internet… around two in the afternoon we were ready to sail – to start our great adventure!
