You buy a boat for a turquoise anchorage off Îlot Maître or a passage to Vanuatu. Then you discover a to-do list that never ends, surprises that wreck the schedule, and a mental load nobody really mentions when you sign.
The gap between the dream and reality
The dream isn’t a lie: evenings at anchor in Kuto, the southern lagoon at first light, arriving in Santo after days at sea, it all exists. But alongside it come the hours spent in the bilges, waiting for parts, comparing quotes, invoices in several currencies, and yard appointments that slide from one week to the next.
A cruising catamaran is dozens of systems, each with its own maintenance, parts and moods. On myCloud we have listed 165 pieces of equipment and 118 points to check. That number isn’t there to scare anyone: it is simply what a Lagoon 440 contains once you take the trouble to list everything.
The list that never ends
Every owner knows the list. Cross off one line and two more appear. The real problem isn’t its length, it’s that it puts everything on the same level: a seacock that no longer closes and a broken locker handle weigh the same in your head. That lack of hierarchy is what wears you down, far more than the work itself.
Then there is memory. When did we change that filter? Who applied that sealant? Where is the charger invoice? Every unanswered question costs a phone call, a search through old messages, sometimes a part bought twice.
That cost appears in no budget. It is paid in evenings spent hunting for a part number, in sailing weekends given up, in tension aboard when the boat takes over every conversation. And it ends up costing money too: a missed deadline, a part ordered twice or a problem that gets worse for lack of follow-up always cost more than if they had been dealt with on time.
Surprises: the hull-to-deck joint
On a trip to Vanuatu, myCloud’s bows started taking water. Looking for the cause, we found that the forward hull-to-deck joint was held only by the trampoline hinge screw and a bead of silicone. Nothing on the outside gave it away. Back home, Patrick rebuilt and re-glassed the whole area over more than a month. That job was in neither the budget nor the calendar.
On a boat built in 2009, this is the rule rather than the exception: open up one area and you often find something behind it. myCloud’s 2024 to 2026 refit shows it, with the saloon windows and hatches, the bows, the sugar scoops and engine mounts, then the mast bulkhead reinforcement, jobs of that scale following one another while the boat kept sailing.
Getting organised without burning out
We have no magic formula, just a few principles that genuinely lighten the load.
- Prioritise: safety first (anything that could hurt someone or put the boat at risk), then structure (anything that gets worse if you wait), then comfort. A list sorted into three groups reads very differently.
- Delegate: you can’t do everything yourself, and that isn’t failure. A good composite or joinery professional beats weekends of DIY that will need redoing.
- Keep a log: record what was done, when, by whom and with what. Beyond a few months, memory isn’t enough.
- Schedule the recurring jobs: whatever comes back every year (anodes, engines, safety gear) needs to leave your head and go into a calendar.
- Keep time for sailing: a boat that never leaves the dock because of work ends up weighing more than it gives.
Accepting a boat that is never “finished”
A boat is never finished. It is seaworthy, safe, and constantly evolving. Accepting that changes your relationship with the list: the goal is no longer to empty it, but to know at any moment what is urgent, what can wait and what has already been done. Leaving a “comfort” item on hold for a season isn’t failure, it’s a choice.
The same goes for you. Some weeks you have neither the energy nor the time, and the boat waits. Better to admit it and protect the essentials than to carry everything all the time.
Where myCloud came from
The myCloud boat management app grew out of exactly this mental load, during the refit, when information was scattered across messages, photos, invoices and memories. Today it holds 165 pieces of equipment, 199 documents and 73 jobs. It doesn’t do the work for us, but it gets it out of our heads: the list is sorted, deadlines show up on their own and the history answers the questions. We tell that story in more detail in Why myCloud.
In the logbook. We have got into the habit of recording what goes well too: a trouble-free passage, a repair still holding after a season. It rebalances the list and reminds us why we bought this boat.