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My Boat
1982 STEVENS 47
FLUENTA
How do professional engineers draft a list of requirements for a family cruising boat to sail the Pacific Northwest, the South Pacific, and various offshore adventures in between? They use a Venn diagram, of course. When Max Shaw and Elizabeth Brown-Shaw began their search for a cruising boat, they did just that, and their diagram was grouped as such: “seaworthiness, habitability for a growing family, and within the budget”. That third criteria made the intersection of the diagram’s three circles more of a singular bullet point that read: Stevens 47. In 2011, they bought the boat that met their needs for great seaworthiness offshore, tough construction, affordability, and space for a family of five — a 1982 Sparkman & Stephens designed Stevens 47 they named Fluenta. Homeported in Sidney, British Columbia, Fluenta looked after the Shaws on their 7 year, 36,000-mile adventure around the Pacific with a family of four, and then five. Today, it remains their liveaboard home. They started their adventure in the Pacific Northwest in 2012, worked their way south to Mexico on what they dubbed the “Mechanical Failure Tour of the West Coast.“ They did a refit on the boat and had a baby in Mexico, and then sailed off to the South Pacific in 2014. Fluenta and family ziggaged around the South Pacific and Micronesia for a few years before heading back to Canada from New Zealand via the Marshall and Aleutian islands, returning in December 2019. ABOUT FLUENTA AND CREW Tell us about your boat’s name. Fluenta is Latin for flowing water. In our former professional lives we had rewarding careers but our day-to-day routines were so hectic that we seemed to lack a natural flow. Flowing water seemed like a good mantra as we transitioned from life ashore to full-time cruising. 48º NORTH
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What key cruising gear was on Fluenta when you bought her, and what have you added to get her to your liking? We bought the boat in the Pacific Northwest where it had been sailing locally for years. While she was fully loaded for offshore cruising, the equipment was 15 years old at best, and either did not work or was on the verge of failure. During our “mechanical failure tour of the West Coast” we learned the hard way that some of the new gear that was installed in a hurry failed, too, and there were some definite lessons learned in working with contractors. Despite the difficulties, we made it to the start of the Baja Ha Ha in time and began settling into “real cruising” in Mexico. But, due to the increasing number of failures and our discovery that some of the survey items were more serious than we initially thought, we stopped moving and dropped anchor in La Cruz to focus on doing a refit. The budget had already taken quite a hit by that point and we did much of the refit ourselves, which was an excellent learning opportunity. On top of that, we had always wanted a third child and, sure enough, he showed up mid-refit. Benjamin was born with a waterbirth at a local facility in Puerto Vallarta; and soon thereafter, the work on Fluenta continued. When we found Fluenta, we were less concerned with buying a boat that already had cruising gear than we were with picking the right design and a solid boat. We retained the old watermaker and massive fridge/freezer system but ended up doing a lot of maintenance to both. Fluenta has an oversized windlass, which we love as it does not complain when we use all 330 feet of chain and our big Rocna in 100 feet of water. A lot of the time in Mexico was spent on less glamorous things like replacing most of the below waterline fittings and hoses, all the sanitation hose, and overhauling the heads and winches. We have an in-boom furler that had its fair share of problems, but with some help, we were finally able to get it tamed. DECEMBER 2020
