Sailing Sans Souci

Uncategorized · March 21, 2021 0

Starting The Search

 

According to yachtworld.com, there are presently 15,374 sailboats for sale in the world. It’s a daunting prospect sifting through that volume to find your boat. To be methodical, I started noting the qualities and features I’d want in her. Initially, I sought something over 35 and under 50 feet long, younger than 40 years, within an affordable price-range, blue-water capable, and well equipped. 

Size matters. When one starts to research marina slip pricing, it takes no time at all to realize that there are big jumps in cost at 40 feet and 50 feet, with 50 feet typically the biggest increase in per foot dockage. Had I done the marina research earlier in my boat search, I would have eliminated a lot of wasted time looking at, and day dreaming about, living on larger boats. Similarly, if I had spent a little time early in the search process visiting a few boats, I would have known to avoid anything under 38 feet as being too tight for my tastes. I guess all this time living in big houses in the Midwest has spoiled me to wanting a little more elbow room. After a couple of tours of smaller boats, I couldn’t picture how I could fit myself, my stuff and, eventually, someone else and their stuff aboard a 37 footer, let alone smaller. Actually sitting in a boat and visualizing life there turned out to be critical in helping me decide on my eventual boat. 

Banks and Insurance companies are seriously ageist! Most marine banks won’t lend on a boat older than 20 years and insurance companies won’t insure anything older than 40. When you search for marine lenders, there are several prominent choices and all of them note that the age of a boat for a used boat loan needs to be 20 years or less. When I trimmed my searches to boats younger than 20, I realized that it was significantly limiting my options. On a hunch, I called Spire, my credit union to ask about their yacht loans. Spire doesn’t loan on yachts and yes, there is a difference between a regular boat loan and a yacht loan, although, I’m not sure where the line is. They recommended I try Wings Financial, a credit union out of Seattle as they loan on larger boats. Not only do they have a yacht loan program, but they also don’t have strict age guidelines. Early on in the search process, I didn’t appreciate how difficult it might be to obtain financing on my eventual choice. Settling on Wings allowed me to expand my search again to boats older than 20 years.

Some of the most enjoyable aspects of my early searching was thinking about and researching what I feel makes a blue-water capable boat. For the uninitiated, blue-water boats are set up for making long passages and are safe and stiff in bad weather. There are constant debates online among sailors about blue-water boats and I’m not dipping my toe into that conflagration. As far as I was concerned, “blue-water capable” was going to fit my personal definition, after a lot of reading and research. Another aspect of the online debate is if it’s even necessary to have a blue-water boat for extended cruising. Indeed, many people have made long, trans-oceanic passages and even circumnavigated in lighter coastal cruisers. I wanted a boat that rides well in a seaway and gives me options when the weather inevitably turns snotty. Coastal cruisers, with their fin keels and spade rudders just don’t appeal to me for riding out a blow. Give me a full or modified fin keel and skeg-hung rudder for both directional and hove-to stability. Heaving-to will be my storm (and exhaustion) survival tactic of choice; I came to this by way of reading “The Storm Tactics Handbook”, the must-read book for world cruisers by Lynne and Larry Pardey (RIP Larry). Full and modified fin keels are much easier to stably heave-to than a fin keel and since I plan to sail quite a bit solo, I need the safety cushion that it provides. Another aspect of a blue-water boat, in my opinion is having good sail plan options. That meant that I was looking at cutter, ketch or yawl rigged boats that afford many options with three or more sails. A cutter rig was my first choice as head sails are easier to manage single handed than a mizzen. I’ll get deeper into other considerations when I write about why I chose what I did. For now, the search had been narrowed.

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