Welcome Aboard!

These pages will cover the restoration and upgrades I have done to a 1979 Choate 40.
I acquired the vessel in poor condition at a reasonable price and so far have put twice that amount into her.
From the evidence I have found, she had been de-masted, run aground several times, slightly flooded, run hard and put away wet.
Fortunately, she had new standing rig with a used mast from a Catalina 40 and a recent head job on the motor.
The rest of the info I'll segregate into pages for detailed information.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

In The Beginning

NOTE: The dates in the archive are only posting dates, not the date of the work.



The TRIX as of the purchase date of Jan. 6, 2003.

I bought the boat on ebay from a charity group to which it had been donated. I did get to look at it before my bidding.
The rigging looked nice and it had a fresh paint job. Beware of fresh paint jobs!


The motor ran but smoked slightly, which turned out to be the nasty homemade wetlift that had been creating too much back pressure. But I'll leave that for the old motor posting. It had a recent head job and new core in the heat exchanger and some new hoses.

The boat came with only a tiller with the main boom traveller right in the middle of the cockpit. I can't count how many times I bashed my shins or tripped over the thing, so that was a project high on the list. Also the foresail winches were aluminum, coated with some kind of ceramic paint, which had been damaged by the crew trying to hoist in a fallen mast. You could see the cable/wire marks in the hull, toerail and on the halyard capstans.

The halyard winches on the cabin top were actually scored so bad to create an under cut at the base of the spool. The windows were screwed on with just a layer of sealer and leaked so bad that there was a pool of water in the chart table compartment just below the larger windows.

It came with a bunch of sails but the only good ones were a short luffed hank on genoa 150%,  a spinnaker, a weird screacher, a couple kevlar film sails (one better then the other), which also had luff tape, meaning it use to have a roller furling before being dismasted. An old tri-sail and a couple stretched out mainsails, one with a belly.


The next weekend after purchase I got a neighbor (Steve) to help me sail it out of the slip in Lk. Union, thru the locks, around a couple points into everett and to dock side awaiting until next morning to go on the hard.


We had a great site coming into port. The sunset lit the sky a deep red like I've never seen before.


The next day she went on the hard.

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