Month: March 2012

Try saying “C&C” three times fast. I’ve been doing that a lot lately, reducing the letters to babbling gibberish. If it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, it’s still less of a mouthful than “Cuthbertson and Cassian,” the two Canadian co-creators of the company.

C&C yacht owners have a certain reputation for fanaticism about the brand that would probably allow the company to get away with calling itself whatever it wanted. That reputation was slightly intimidating when we first took a look at one last year. An older 38 (which is still on the market… at almost the same price), the owner was enthusiastic to the point that we thought he might change his mind about the sale right in the middle of the showing. Whether it was the low expectations we held for the interior space of what was primarily reputed to be a racing sailboat or the infectious zeal of the owner, we came away pleasantly surprised.

Our budget has gone up since then and the age range has gone down a bit, but we were more prepared to look at C&Cs again after we sold our boat and started the final push to find a replacement.

The big concern we had originally was the deep draft. We want something that sails well on the wind, sure, but does it really have to be that well? Seven feet of keel gets you to the point where certain popular anchorages start to become dicey and distance from shore in others becomes extreme. But we have managed to talk ourselves out of that objection for now. Also, one of the candidate C&Cs on our list is the Landfall 38; not a proper racer at all, but a dedicated cruiser, it primarily came in shoal draft version that drew 4’11”.

The other big strike you hear about C&Cs is the cored hull. Not many other popular brands have this feature, which provides additional strength and stiffness without adding weight, a fine thing in a performance sailboat. One reason hardly anyone else does it is that it is difficult to do well and the consequences can be traumatic. Many sailors are familiar with the perils of rotten coring in decks; imagine the same situation below the waterline and you have some idea why folks get a little hinky when the subject comes up. I’ve never seen this fact remarked upon in the sailing press, however, without the attached caveat “…but I’ve never seen one with problems.” Apparently C&C did it right. That doesn’t mean the owners continued to coddle them as necessary, however, and I still get cold sweats thinking about a leaky thru-hull or toe-rail missed at survey.

The current object of our affections is the C&C 37+, also known as the C&C 37/40 XL, or the C&C 37/40+, closely related to the C&C 37/40 R, or just the plain old C&C 37R. We’ve never seen a forty-foot boat with as many misleading names. A last hurrah from the company after it went into receivership and before it was finally purchased by Tartan in the late nineties, not many were built and the line was ultimately rather unsuccessful.

But as per expectations, the hardware is beefy and the performance is reputed to be good. Better yet, the interior has good storage, a voluminous head (adjacent to the companionway ladder) with a separate shower, and an utterly decadent master berth beneath the cockpit. You pay for that with a reduction in cockpit storage; her little sister, the 34+ (don’t get me started on the names again; it’s 36 feet, and also on our list) has a terrific cockpit locker that would have been nice to see in the larger version.

Possibly because there wasn’t a huge production run, there are not a lot of sources of information on the boat, even on the normally voluble C&C owner’s mailing list. Some owners seem to love them, others have complained of poor workmanship and quality problems.

The model seems to meet most of our criteria, although the draft still gives us some pause. They did make a wing keel version, and there are one or two of those on the market, but they are on the East coast. The two available locally have the standard 7’3″ bulb on the bottom. One of them has been defiled by the installation of in-mast furling, which for our purposes would probably have to be removed and replaced at some point. At the right price, we could work around those issues; a vicious and thorough survey might lay to rest questions of build quality and hull compromise.

There is a 34+ also on the market locally, but at the same price as the larger version, it seems silly to give up four feet of space, no matter how shiny she is.

I would like to take a look at a Landfall 38, but there are none for sale nearby currently. Mandy got a chance to look at one on a recent trip to Florida but all I can get her to say about it is, “It was weird,” so I probably need to take a look in person to pass judgement.

Our scorecard on the 37+:

Performance
Based on a racing hull that has been fairly successful locally and nationally, we think this shouldn’t be a problem. The additional weight introduced by cruising equipment and stores may degrade slightly from the top-end potential but even compromised we imagine better performance than a dedicated cruiser of this length.

Layout
The aft cabin is perfect for privacy and provides a space where a workable desk space could be introduced for my business. Mandy likes the galley layout and large hanging lockers. The nav station is more or less worthless, but we can probably do something with it. The common U-shaped settee wrapped around the fixed table is not totally our cup of tea but it’s not as wasteful as some are. And we’re pretty happy about the head location (wet locker!) and layout.

Storage
This is fair to good. There are a lot of secure and divided compartments with attractive cabinetry, and probably a sufficient number of larger spaces for bulky items. It could use much better cockpit or deck storage (I neglected to check the chain locker entirely) but you can’t have that and a huge aft cabin on a forty foot boat.

Compromises
A lot of lead that goes way down. Cored hull necessitates constant vigilance for rot problems. Tiny holding tank, without a clear location to augment it. The good light air performance also means she would probably need to be reefed early and often in variable winds, leading to workload problems. Some folks suggest they have control problems running downwind, although others claim to not have had any issues.

It wasn’t news to us when we went to full-throttle on our boat search that the biggest obstacle to finding our next home was going to be the listing brokers. We had been nosing around the market for the past year or so, and found ourselves constantly amazed at the lack of attention and responsiveness we found from most yacht brokers.

We had thought, though, that perhaps this was something we had brought on ourselves… some scent we had given off that brokers could smell and which somehow told them, “These people still haven’t sold their last boat yet… they’re not going to buy from you right now!” Or maybe we were too pushy, wanting to look at chain plates and engine mounts and keel bolts and asking uncomfortable questions about the provenance of streaks beneath hatches and portlights. Maybe they had plenty of easier customers lined up and we were just a waste of time to deal with at the time.

Those theories have mostly evaporated for us now. We’re still pushy and ask uncomfortable questions, but a lot of these boats obviously don’t have other buyers lining up for them because they’ve been on the market for months and months, and now we’ve got a pile of cash sitting around waiting to shower on some receptive buyer. But we still can’t get people to show us the boats!

Yesterday was a beautiful day to show a sailboat: sunny, breezy, not freezing (finally), a fine day for prospective buyers to be imagining themselves out behind the wheel of a gorgeous new sailboat. Mandy and I planned to spend the whole day hopping around looking at boats all along the northern Puget Sound.

In the end, we looked at one boat. Three different brokers, representing another five boats between them, just never got back to us. I had called earlier in the week to set up appointments. I spoke personally to two brokers, one of which I set the appointment with on the boat we actually did look at (although he got the time wrong by an hour), the other of who agreed to send me location and access information via e-mail but never did. The others just never called.

I would write this off to a bad streak of luck if it weren’t so consistent with our broker experiences. We have met exactly two brokers in the past year who have actually followed up with us, put any effort into answering our questions, or shown any sort of interest in getting the boats they are showing into presentable condition. The rest have been varying degrees of disinterested.

Something we consistently ask for after viewing any boat and leaving our contact information is for the broker to let us know if anything new pops up on their radar in the size/price/feature range we are looking for. But no one has ever bothered; finding out about new listings, even from brokers we have spoken with at length, is like pulling teeth. Perhaps there is some marketing technique that involves keeping your products secret that we are unaware of; if so, local yacht brokers are masters of the approach.

This can go so far as physically removing vessels to be viewed from their berths. We managed to get hold of one broker earlier in the week to take a look at one of our candidate boats. He told me where it was, and asked that I call back the next day to confirm. I did, and he asked me to call back again the day of the viewing to confirm. I did, and he seemed surprised. He told us again where the boat was but that he didn’t yet know how to get into it, but that we should meet him there and he’d figure it out.

Ten minutes later, he called back. “Yeah, it’s not at that marina anymore,” he said.

So we drove across town to meet him at the new marina it had been moved to, and then walked up and down the docks trying to find it. We did, eventually, by squinting hard enough to make out the vessel name through the thick patina of algae and grime that was covering it. It looked like it had only recently been raised from the sea floor. But we’d driven a long way and a little cleaning doesn’t bother us if the bones are solid, so we shrugged and started to climb aboard.

“Hello?” we heard a faint voice from inside. “Is someone there?”

The owner, apparently, had rented the boat out and neglected to inform the broker there was a liveaboard, and neglected to inform the liveaboard that his home was for sale. Nonetheless, he was extremely good-natured about the intrusion and helpfully showed us around.

Afterward, the broker told us, “I’m surprised you bothered to go aboard after seeing the outside!” Like most brokers, he blamed the owner. Another broker later told us he didn’t understand why owners wouldn’t spend a few hundred bucks cleaning a boat up so it would sell. There is certainly a good point there, but on the other hand, we find ourselves asking why a broker who stands to make ten percent of the sale wouldn’t do the same. It seems like they would have a compelling financial interest in doing so; if their stake in an individual vessel isn’t as large as that of the buyer, the percentage of their total income the sale represents is surely larger.

As far as we can tell, brokers exist primarily to enter typos into Yachtworld listings, avoid taking phone calls, write down appointments incorrectly, and go to lunch. Frankly, it seems like a pretty cushy job, and Mandy and I are putting some consideration into opening our own brokerage now. We even think we have figured out how you can still make money running a business like that: the customers are all nuts.

This makes more sense the more we think about it. At a recent gathering, a fellow sailor advanced the theory that all of us boaters are simply bat-shit crazy. “It’s not like we haven’t heard all the warnings,” he said. “We’ve all got stacks of books this thick with horror stories from everyone else who has ever owned a boat about everything that can go wrong. But six months later, after shelling our our life savings for one, we’ll be sitting there in a bar ourselves saying, ‘No shit, there I was….'” And he was right; we’re going to go spend a completely unreasonable amount of money on some leaky scow that will take that much again to simply own and operate, causing us considerable indigestion and sleepless nights along the way.

I think you can apply that same basic theory to just about anyone or anything nautical. So that explains why we’re going to go throw our money away on a new boat despite the brokers’ best efforts to prevent it, and it explains why we keep hearing that marina operators are supremely worried that they can’t keep their slips filled yet we just got a rate notice increase from them, and it explains why brokers themselves who stand to make ten or twenty grand on a boat sale won’t return the calls of folks with money burning a hole in their pocket or lift a finger to clean up an otherwise serviceable vessel.

I guess it all just works to keep life interesting.

Ever since we settled last summer on selling our boat and getting a larger one instead, my wife and I have been keeping one eye on the used boat market both regionally and nationally. Other than day-dreaming and wandering down to the brokerage offices in our free time, we were pretty cavalier about it… it seemed folly to become too attached to anything currently for sale because, until our own boat sold, we wouldn’t be buying. In this economy, we expected that to be a long, long time.

Instead, it was last week. Becoming suddenly homeless has a wonderful way of concentrating the mind, so our desultory poking about among yacht listings and occasional capricious viewing of boats for sale has transformed into a highly-focused, militantly-organized, ruthless scouring of the local sailboat market.

I’ve found looking for a new boat to be considerably more challenging than any other big purchase I have ever made. There are fewer on the market in the first place compared to, say, houses or cars, and when you really start looking at what is available in a given range of sizes, you realize that there are fewer options yet. It’s a truism that every boat is a compromise, a living space carved into a shell dictated by a harsh and unforgiving environment.

There are a limited set of characteristics that sailboat designers can work with, and most of them have settled for riffing on the same basic themes. They all make the same sets of trade-offs. I don’t know if this was purely market driven or simply a failure of the imagination, but boats that have the particular set of trade-offs that we are looking for are few and far between. It’s as if every car ever made were basically a van, a sports car, or a station wagon. Very few builders seem to have covered the middle ground we are interested in.

What are we looking for? I guess I would describe it as a performance cruiser in the 36 to 40 foot range with sensible storage and layout. Our budget is modest, as these things go, but let’s say it has us looking at twenty-to-forty year old hulls for the most part.

As we’ve been looking, it’s become clear that maintenance is a far greater factor than age. But it’s unusual to find boats that old that haven’t had more than one owner, and with every additional owner comes the possibility that someone was less than diligent with upkeep. For the right price, we’re prepared to accept a certain amount of disrepair, although we’re also mindful of the fact that the neglect you can see often pales next to the neglect you can’t see… a few minor fiberglass blemishes on the bow of one recent candidate led to a whole pitiful story of woe and abandonment that put the risk premium through the roof for that particular boat.

Those are the sorts of things we can price in on an offer. What you can’t negotiate your way around is the basic design and build quality. These are the basic characteristics we are looking for:

Performance
We like to sail. We like to sail a lot. We often find ourselves ticking along at some small fraction of a knot when everyone else has long since done the sensible thing and dropped sail to motor past giving us funny looks and sometimes rude gestures. We also have bought into some of the new schools of thought on cruising, which basically say that light air is a more common challenge on passage than heavy seas, and that while modern forecasting and communications are not a bullet-proof method of storm avoidance, they do reduce the risks of encountering dangerous situations considerably over years past. Speed and accurate decision-support are the new full keel.

And, particularly for as long as we stick around the Pacific Northwest, pointing is important. Our north/south oriented bodies of water align directly with the most prevalent winds, which means you are nearly always heading directly upwind or downwind. A bathtub with a pillow case can go downwind, but working to windward with any sort of efficiency takes something that can go close-hauled.

Layout
It is unquestionably challenging to design an interior that is safe and comfortable while underway but is adequate and airy enough for real life. Mandy and I both run our own businesses and we both primarily (and necessarily, when sailing far from the city) work from home. We both need space to work; in fact, the lack of reasonable work space is the primary reason we sold our old boat. Understandably, very few designers put much emphasis on this sort of interior space. In fact, the trend is in the opposite direction, with electronic charting creating an excuse to move down to postage-stamp sized nav desks, and the all-important berth count mandating awkward aft cabins and unwieldy cabin tables. A nice compromise between open and useful that we appreciated on our old boat was a fold-away table in the main cabin. These seem to be the exception rather than the rule, however.

We also really like having the head aft of the main cabin. How it is that other people make do in the Pacific Northwest sailing without a wet locker or similar near the companionway is beyond us. Not tracking water all through the cabin has been a huge bonus for comfort on our current boat. It’s also nice, in rough seas, to be able to duck in for a head call right at the bottom of the ladder (and nearer the center of motion) instead of struggling forward to the nausea-inducing bow. There’s also a certain ick factor avoided by keeping the holding tank and any potentially leaky hoses a goodly distance away from where one sleeps.

Storage
In that quest for more spacious layouts, a lot of designers really sacrificed storage space. We were surprised when we were looking at boats five and six feet longer than ours that had less effective storage space. The large aft staterooms eat away at the cockpit storage that has served us as a garage these past years. The quest for broad interiors leaves only nooks and crannies for stowage, eliminating some of the big spaces such as we were able to use for tool boxes, spare life vests, and other bulky items. We could fit our entire deflated dinghy and a spare, and all pumps, patches, and oars for both in one of the compartments beneath our v-berth. We are very much looking for some vessel that approximates this amount of accessible storage space.

Compromises
The tradeoffs we are willing to make for these requirements? Well, we figure we’re going to have to sacrifice some stability, seakindliness, and manageability, for starters. Boats that go fast from the era we are looking at tended to follow the much-maligned IOR standard, which we are given to understand can be a handful in a blow. We are probably looking at reduced tankage compared to traditional cruising boats. We’ll give up some safety factors in accepting a partial skeg or spade rudder, which are more susceptible to damage. We’ll give up some anchorages and passes that won’t accomodate the deeper keel that we’ll need for the windward performance. We’ll end up paying more for the interior layout than we might if we were to go with the more traditional, and more widely available, designs from that era. Since we’re looking at production boats, maintenance and hull access are going to be problems (although large and active owner communities are a benefit for these things).

There are probably other compromises that we aren’t even aware we are making yet; our experiences with our last boat have told us a lot about what we think we want, but we can’t pretend that those are universal experiences. I expect we’ll find that we have traded away some things that we haven’t even been aware of yet. And of course it’s entirely possible that we will end up compromising on our compromises… we’re restricted by what’s out there, none of which is exactly what we might draw if we were commissioning a boat from scratch.

I don’t mean to whine; in fact, it’s a pretty good market for buyers right now, and we are finding stuff out there to get excited about. A lot of Perry designs fit this bill to greater or lesser extent; a few of Rob Ball’s C&C designs, while imbued with other drawbacks (getting into Tsehum Harbour was nervewracking enough without seven odd feet of lead hanging under us), have been surprisingly thoughtfully designed as cruisers despite their racing pedigrees. And we think there are some Ericsons that would probably work out nicely for us.

So that’s where we’re starting from. I expect that we will be disabused of our more fantastic notions and hardened by the realities of the used boat market as the search progresses… watch it unfold here live!