SV Avocet: Couple Renovate Their Dream Boat and Sail Away

Hello there readers! My name is Marissa and I have successfully commandeered Boat Renovation People to write about the trials and triumphs during our first year living aboard our 1979 Cheoy Lee 41 SV Avocet (here the offial website).

I say “we” as I am just the humble first mate, admiral, and galley wench who has the honour of sharing this floating home with my husband Chris; who is the captain and self-proclaimed shipwright. We also share our living space with our deck paw, Cleo the boat cat. 

Long story short, we had decided on boat life long before we even started researching boats from our one bedroom apartment in North Lake Tahoe. Chris was born into a sailing family as his mom has a Mason 43 in the San Francisco Bay while his brother, Jon, is the captain of SV Prism and has 12,000+ nautical miles under his keel.

Chris and I created a small list of “must-haves” when it came to choosing a boat, which was great because we have standards, but awful because well, we have standards and being a young newly wed, newly graduated college couple it made hard to find the perfect boat. We came across Avocet by chance and she checked every one of our boxes except one, but we will get to that later. After pulling our money and getting a loan we pulled the trigger and became the 3rd owners of SV Avocet!

So when we first bought Avocet, the first thing that needed to be done was a deep clean. The previous owner neglected the task of tidying for what seemed to be years so there was a lot of mold, dust and other unspeakables.

Underneath our oven, there were maggots munching on food that had been left for months, maybe even years. So after putting on our rubber gloves and hazmat suits (just kidding, I wish we had hazmat suits) we got Avocet spic, span and gosh darn near livable.