If I had it my way, Cat and I would be sailing off into the sunset on a 47’ performance cruising catamaran, something like this:
But it ain’t gonna happen. Not on this trip, anyway.
As mentioned in the previous post, we settled on a budget of around $40k. Unless we’re going to live on a souped up HobieCat, it was gonna have to be a monohull. Based on previous experience with life aboard sailboats, I had a good idea of what we would want in a boat. And based on the countless hours spent browsing Yachtworld, I also had a realistic idea of what we could afford. This is what it came down to:
Length: 32 to 40 feet. Smaller than that and we’ve barely got room for ourselves, let alone friends. Larger and we probably can’t afford the upfront cost and definitely not the ongoing maintenance.
All sailboats are not created equal, however. Classic (early-70s and older, let’s say) tend to be narrow, low to the water, with long sweeping overhangs on the bow and stern. Beautiful, but cramped inside the cabin. Modern sailboats tend to be chubby and tall with a lot of emphasis put on interior accommodation. A mid-90s 32 footer will almost certainly be as roomy as a 40 footer from the mid-60s. This may come at the expense of storage space and sea kindliness, but the priority for many folks is comfort at the dock.
We fall in the middle. We were after a combination of decent sailing performance, at least two double berths (v-berth and a large aft quarter-berth, private or otherwise), plenty of fuel and water tankage, and space to store supplies. This pretty well ruled out the smaller classic boats and even the newer 32ish foot Beneteaus, Jenneaus, etc. The latter doesn’t have shit for tankage or storage space, even if they do manage to cram two private cabins and a shower stall into a tiny boat.
Construction material: Fiberglass represents probably 95% of small cruising yachts built after the 1960s for good reason. Wood rots, steel is heavy, aluminum is uhhh… I don’t even know about aluminum, but there aren’t many out there. And then there’s ferro-cement. Sail around in a boat made of re-bar and concrete? No thanks. Fiberglass, without a doubt.
Rig: Sloop, yawl, ketch, schooner. Lots of different rig arrangements out there, but as far as I can tell none of them sail much better than a sloop (single mast with a fore sail and a mainsail) and all the others have more equipment involved to achieve the same task. I wouldn’t have ruled out a different rig if the rest of the boat made sense, but preference was always for a sloop.
Keel: Didn’t particularly want a full keel, but I can appreciate some of their benefits. My ideal would have been an encapsulated fin keel (molded in as part of the hull as opposed to being bolted on) with a fully skeg-hung rudder. She had to draw less than 6 feet fully loaded, as there’s a hell of a lot of skinny water in the Bahamas, East Coast, and other destinations we’re likely to cruise.
The Other Stuff: Beyond the fundamental design of yacht, there are a number of other features that are required, or at least very nice to have, for a boat that is going to be lived on and cruised long distances, often far away from civilization. I won’t list all of them, but here are a handful of things that aren’t necessarily permanent features of a boat, but are pretty damn important.
- Heavy anchor and lots of chain – Want to sleep at night?
- Autopilot – Handsteering is tiring and can be difficult, even dangerous, when a crew of only 1 or 2 people has to respond to a situation. Try steering, handling lines, winches, and going forward to the mast all at the same time.
- Roller furling headsail – Pull a line and your fore sail spins neatly around itself, tucking it away for later. Pull another line and it pops back out. The alternative is having to go forward, hank on a sail, raise it up, and then reverse the process when you’re done. Working on the bow in big or even moderate seas is not fun.
- Solar or wind power – Unless you’ve got a big supply of diesel (and don’t mind listening to the engine clunking away), it’s important to have some way of generating electricity. We anticipate being at anchor nearly every single night, meaning no power from shore. Solar is preferable to wind, as I’ve never encountered an example of the latter that wasn’t noisy as hell.
- GPS – We’ve moved past the days of relying solely on dead reckoning and celestial navigation.
- Bimini – Shade for the cockpit is absolutely essential. The more the better. And it doesn’t come cheap if you’ve got to get it fabricated.
Oh, and the one and only thing that really matters in the end: She couldn’t be a piece of shit. All boats, no matter how well built, will succumb to their salty, destructive mother without constant diligent maintenance.  I was not interested in a project boat for this trip, nor is it likely that I will ever be interested in one. We required a boat that was well maintained and basically ready to sail away, as we did not want to burn up our limited time and money correcting the wrongs of a neglectful previous master.
So That’s a pretty good summary of what we were looking for. Luckily for us, plenty of boat builders over the years have agreed with our sensibilities and there are a fair few models of boats out there that meet our needs. Unfortunately, as I related in the market research post, the availability of these isn’t quite as wide spread in the Caribbean as I had hoped, but it seemed achievable with some effort and patience.
With a set of criteria in mind, it was time to look for a broker to represent us in the purchasing process. I’ll go into what a broker does, why we chose to use one, how I went about finding him, and my initial interactions with him in Part 4.
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