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Yes yes yes, a dream to build your own wooden topsail schooner, what an achievement ! And then ?? To sail a wooden topsail schooner !! But we didn´t planned that part so well as we did with the building. We never had thought that a half-finished vessel would be as useable as not built at all. The course could never have been set and all effort was made on an alternatively finished vessel and alternative choices to make a living….
We´re in 2016. 24th of March, a sad day. The legendary number 14 -the Messias- had died: RIP great master of out of the box but practical thinking. His spirit should and would always be honored and respected: the Tocorimé needs to go on guys !! She´s rotting away and we do nothing… We didn´t went all this way to see this happen !!?? We couldn´t drop the idea anymore and a re-start of the Tocorimé was obvious; we simply needed to start something up again…
But she broken, sadly and in terrible shape… you would need a fortune to get her up and running. Again not many people supported the idea and raised the same eyebrows as 25 years ago. Well, we built the bloody thing; fixing her up must be fun !! I didn´t want to repeat the same mistake of having too many Captains to set the course: I made it clear to the shareholders that I wanted to have total freedom of handling. But alone is not smart so, I got 4 brain-stormers from the old team; Neil, Jaap & Mark. And there we went….
First to do is to have a clear view of exact status: would it be worth to fix her up ?? We brought good old Olivier to Paraty for a technical- and financial evaluation. The boat was in very poor condition but he was enormously enthusiast about the hull and decks ! He was really surprised to see the quality of wood & craftmanship: “very high quality and not seen anywhere” ! He couldn´t believe we did this all by hand !!
But…. “the rest is scrap”, he said…. Boing ! Swallow that dude ! The masts and other round wood was not be used; totally rotten and invaded by termites…. But al least, the hull was good and the rest all interchangeable, the integrity was 100% – YES !! That was all we needed….
Secondly, we needed her closer to home to keep an eye on her and start fixing things up. We prepared her for the trip back to Rio. That’s not easy with rotten water- and diesel tanks, no navigation, the compass was stolen, no electricity, a bucket as toilet and who needs a fridge ? We even didn´t had the Navy registration…
The plan is in Rio to do an alternative prepping for an ocean crossing and do a total refit in Holland. The old contacts there together with the possibilities of social media nowadays, would get us in the right spotlights this time !! Oh Yes, we´re back on deck and how good does that feel ?!!!
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