Living Aboard Sleepy Dragon: Slowly but Surely

It takes alot to convert a boat to a comfortable liveaboard boat. Harthrob is a Searay 380 Aft Cabin. It was pretty much designed to set at a dock plugged into shore power or have the genset running. There are only two opening windows in the main salon and they only opened about 9". The port in the aft cabin only opened about 3". Clearly the builders expected you to run the genset if you were away from the dock. When you are living aboard you can't run the genset 24/7 so we had to make some modifications to be able to live on this boat year round in the Keys. The first thing we did was to install a small 5,000 btu air conditioner in the aft cabin. The little Honda generator that we have will run this unit at low idle. We had an unusual night last night in that it was dead calm and the mosquitoes were out in force (very rare for here). So I closed up the boat and turned on the AC. We had to turn it down I think you could have hung meet in there it was so cold.

Next I decided to make the center portion of the windshield able to open. Lots of boats have this feature. It took longer than I thought to do it, but it was well worth the time. The amount of air that comes in is amazing. Who knows maybe by the end of the summer all three will open.

Another project that I started on was access to the aft deck from the water. Since we live on a mooring we always board the boat from the stern after tying the dingy up to the swim platform. Originally there was a ladder that went 5' straight up to the aft deck from the swim platform. It was a real pain to climb not to mention bringing home groceries. I had seen a couple of boats similar to ours that had steps built to make it easier to board. I priced building the frame out of stainless steel and aluminum. $600 for aluminum vs. $1,500 for stainless. I made them out of aluminum. I am going to enclose the bottom of the stairs with starboard (plastic plywood) and that will be the future home of the generator, water jugs, and propane bottle for the grill. But alas it all takes time (and money).

Leaving Little Shark River on the way down to the Keys.

Almost to the Keys.

Ladder from the swim platform to the aft deck. I have plastic over the A/C to keep debris out of it while I was cutting materials on the aft deck above it. I have since painted it black so that it does not stand out as much.