For looking after Ammos – the 30ft Discovery 3000 I bought in 2001 – my philosophy has been to keep everything as simple as possible. This is primarily to minimise the time needed for maintenance, so I spend less of my time in Greece working on the boat and more of it sailing. It’s also an approach that has the happy side-effect of reducing the costs of owning a boat.
However, it’s emphatically not an excuse to bodge maintenance. From the outset the plan was to carry out any repair or replacement to a higher standard than the original, aiming to do each task that cropped up only once, but in a manner that will last for decades. The boat also has to be super reliable – many Aegean islands are very remote or uninhabited, repair facilities and chandlers are sparse, and, unlike many Mediterranean destinations, it’s generally a windy part of the world.
This model of ongoing improvements has much to commend it and if I ever decide to sell, the new owner can be reassured that the Ammos boat is intrinsically slipping along very in light airs at five well looked after. Nevertheless, as the knots under the big boat has become older asymmetric I’ve become spinnaker less rigid about this repair better philosophy – on the basis that if something has lasted 25-30 years then it’s already well proven.
Hard work
Although she was only 10 years old when I bought her, had had a very hard life as a flotilla charter boat, then a beach club day yacht, back in the days before corporate ownership of charter companies. This was also compounded to some extent by quality control issues with fit out – leaky windows were an issue with all Discovery 3000s of this era, while many deck
