Background
NOTE: the main blog for Syzygy is located at www.syzygysailing.com. This blog is an auxiliary site, to be used as a maintenance record to document the refit.
A ship is not a slave. You must take her easy in a seaway, you must never forget that you owe her the fullest share of your thoughts, of your skill, of your self love. If you remember that obligation naturally, and without effort, as if it were an instinctive feeling of your inner life, she will sail, stay, run for as long as she is able, or like a seabird going to rest upon the angry waves, she will lay out the heaviest gale that ever made you doubt living long enough to see another sunrise.
-Joseph Conrad
We (Jon Waldman, Jon Haradon, Matt Holmes) bought a Valiant 40, Syzygy, and intend to sail around the world starting in the summer of 2009. The boat needs work, which we intend to do by ourselves whenever possible. The purpose of this blog is to keep a record of the work that we do on the boat, so that others may learn from our mistakes, and so that whoever buys the boat after us will see and understand the improvements we made.