First trip getting my boat home nightmare!

[Don C L]

Impeller in water pump, covered by plate with screws. Draws in cooling water to engine. Easy and inexpensive to replace. Should be done very soon if you don't know its age. Not a bad idea to have find a good local mechanic to give the engine a once-over or perhaps you did already. You'll be depending on the engine.
Friend in slip next to me just bought the Cat 27 and he is a novice too but like you eager to learn and fix up the boat. After a few practice sailing trips he equipped it with anchors, safety gear and a dinghy and we just took it out to Santa Cruz island for his first trip across the channel for a couple nights. He is hooked now!

[lifeofreilly57]

Every boat I've ever owned has had some issues that didn't show up in the survey. I've gone through them with a fine tooth comb, then had a professional surveyor go through them and still things failed on the transport from the previous owners port to my home port. I look at it like a shakedown cruise to produce my to do list, this last boat produced a three page line list in it's first 300 mile transport, I look at it as a good way to asses your new purchase.
What I've found was that the previous owners usually just fix it enough to get it by and hope it doesn't fail during the pre-purchase sea trial. Anyone who hasn't had this experience is either really lucky or has owned only new boats, which also come with their own teething issues.
Your blessed, not only do you have a boat, you've entered into a whole new learning experience, just take it with a grain of salt and be smart, fix the really important things first, then get on to the lesser items.
One thing I do advise though, use regular black metal pipe in the exhaust piping, it's getting back to the order of sacrificial metals, the pipng is relatively cheap, the exhaust manifold they're attached to is relatively expensive, you'd really rather have the cheap piping be the sacrificial part of the system, not the expensive manifold. My guess is the piping that was there was replaced at some time since the original build, I've never seen an OEM use galvanized piping.
Good luck, good sailing.
Cheers