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!