The shape of the problem
Nothing on Swallow is catastrophically wrong. That is worth saying first, because what follows is a long list and lists always read worse than they are.
What is wrong is subtler and more interesting. Every owner for thirty-three years added something — a stereo, a charger, a fridge, an autopilot that has since been removed — and every one of them did the reasonable thing, which was to tap into whatever wire was nearest. Nobody ever went back and tidied up. The result is a boat where the original panel daisy-chains its circuit breakers together with jumper wires instead of a proper bus bar, where the shore-power inlet had visibly cooked itself before we ever saw it, and where the battery cables had corroded to the point that the starter motor would sometimes simply decline to turn.
Underneath all of it is water. A leaking deck fitting has been quietly dripping into the boat for years, and standing water is what ate the cables in the first place. So the order of operations matters: fix the leaks, then fix the electrics. Do it the other way round and you do it twice.
The work
Shore power, from the dock in
The original inlet had a burnt earth terminal — a genuinely alarming thing to find, because the earth wire should never carry any current at all. We replaced the lot: a new SmartPlug inlet, the internal feed re-run in heavier 8 AWG cable with proper service loops at both ends, and a galvanic isolator fitted in the aft locker to stop the neighbours' boats quietly eating our anode through the shore ground.
Live and charging since 25 July.
The battery and DC rebuild
Both original batteries were completely dead when we took her over. The replacement plan is a full redesign rather than a swap: a lithium house bank, a separate AGM battery dedicated to starting, a Victron charger and monitoring system, and proper overcurrent protection throughout — which the boat has essentially never had.
Backing boards are epoxied in, the isolator is mounted, the batteries are aboard. The cabinets are out and staying out until every cable is run.
A new distribution panel
The original panel is the reason the A/C is currently forbidden. Its breakers are linked on the supply side by jumper wires rather than a bus bar, so the wire carrying the total load of everything downstream gets extremely hot — hot enough to smell the insulation after a few minutes of running the air conditioning.
The replacement lands every breaker on a proper common bus bar rated for the whole panel, which designs the problem out rather than patching it. Everything else waits behind this one.
Why she doesn't always start
Sometimes you turn the key and nothing happens. No crank, no click. Then the next day she starts perfectly. This is the single thing standing between us and using the boat, because an engine you cannot trust is worse than no engine at all — the worry is never leaving the dock, it is being in the middle of the lake and wanting to come back.
Suspicion currently falls on the starter trigger circuit and, most interestingly, on the gearbox neutral-safety switch — the only candidate that naturally explains a fault that comes and goes rather than steadily worsening.
Deck leaks
Three of them: the forward hatch, something above the port settee, and — the one that matters — water arriving in the engine tray after heavy rain, almost certainly through the emergency tiller port behind the pedestal.
This is where the corrosion came from, so it gets fixed before anything new gets installed.
Air conditioning
The existing unit is a sixteen-thousand BTU monster from the 1990s that, on close inspection in August, turned out not to be refrigerating at all — inlet and outlet pipes the same temperature, no condensation anywhere. It is also roughly twice the size the boat needs, and it draws more current than the dock can supply.
The replacement is a 9,000 BTU variable-speed inverter unit that modulates instead of short-cycling. First, though, the boat needs an actual air return — at present the only path is through a finger hole in a locker lid.
Autopilot
A Raymarine wheel pilot, which is the single biggest unlock for sailing her short-handed. It is sitting in the cabin waiting for the panel swap and a $40 adapter cable.
A feathering propeller
The existing propeller is missing a sizeable piece of one blade. Rather than repair it, we are going to a feathering prop — much less drag under sail, and far better astern thrust, which is the thing that makes single-handed docking survivable.
Built to order, four to eight weeks, and specified from measurements you can only take with the prop off. Which sets a deadline in October.
Standing rigging
The wire is original. Thirty-three years old, no evidence it has ever been changed, and long past every published replacement guideline.
The awkward part is that the usual failure mode — corrosion inside the swaged fittings — is not visible from the outside, so no amount of looking at it can clear it. It gets replaced next time the mast is down.
Canvas
There is no bimini and no dodger, and — more to the point — no frame for either, so this is metalwork as well as sewing. On a Texas lake the enemy is sun rather than spray, so the bimini is the one that earns its keep, and it is the one that can realistically arrive before the weather turns.
Where the money goes
We bought her under her market value and then set about spending considerably more than that putting her right, which is either foolish or the entire point depending on how you look at it. We think it is the point. Swallow is a lovely boat to learn on and also a rehearsal — for a bigger boat, later, where the same mistakes would cost five times as much.
The most useful thing we have learned so far, and it was not free: unwinding thirty-three years of deferred maintenance costs something like two to three times what the boat cost to buy. Apply that ratio to a boat worth a quarter of a million dollars and the argument for paying a large premium for one that has genuinely been looked after becomes very easy to make.
