Month: May 2012

If you’ve never seen a Freedom, then what you probably first need to know about them is that the word “freedom” means “free from rigging.” As in, “Look Ma, no stays!” Freedom Yachts manufactured from the eighties on were designed and built to use un-stayed carbon fiber masts. Like everyone else, I did a second take the first time I saw one… “What the hell is holding that stick up in the air?”

Just sheer, brute strength, baby… carbon fiber has almost 8 times the tensile strength of aluminum. The strength is close to that of steel, while the weight is nearer to plastic. Instead of a forest of wires and fittings scattered around the boat and overhead designed to tension and compress the mast to maintain rigidity, the unstayed rig puts all faith in a strong, but flexible mast material, and in the deck and step beneath that will take the loads as wind energy is transfered into the hull. Instead of compressing, the mast bends.

If this sounds disconcerting to you, it does to me, too. I keep flashing back to that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer decides to go commando: “I’m out there, Jerry, and I’m loving every minute of it!” I spent a lot of time digging into the pros and cons of unstayed rigs before I got comfortable with the idea. Predictably, as with any new and unfamiliar technology introduced to a traditional field, the views on these rigs tend to quickly and completely divide into the “love it” and “hate it” camps. I won’t bother re-hashing the various arguments, but while maintaining a healthy dollop of skepticism on the concept, I will say that the simplicity of the unstayed rig appeals to me. Both sailing and maintenance become much easier with this design.

While most of the oomph comes from the over-sized main, a self-tacking blade jib provides some additional upwind capability. Still, I’m told that going to weather is not the rig’s forte. That’s of some concern here in the north/south slot of the Salish Sea.

After looking at boat after boat after boat with serious and expensive rigging issues… leaky chainplates, inaccessible chainplates, kinked wire, bent terminals, poor leads, the list goes on… I could be convinced that windward performance may be a worthwhile sacrifice. And a few extra tacks are no great hindrance when tacking is as simple as turning the wheel. No more grinding, no more overrides, no more genoa hang-ups on the radome.

It’s easy to obsess over the unconventional rig, but what we actually found most appealing about the Freedom was the interior. It’s the biggest 36 footer we’ve ever seen. With twelve and a half foot of beam, the interior volume easily rivals any 38 footer we have looked at, and it’s not appreciably smaller than some of the 40s. The Freedom makes good use of all that space, combining good tankage with good storage, a full-sized nav-desk, a wet-locker adjacent to the companionway, a sizeable aft cabin, and a fold-away salon table that can seat six but can also disappear for an impromptu game of Twister after dinner.

The nav desk is plenty large enough for me to work at, although the swing-out stool may be inadequate seating. There is considerable galley storage and a decent-sized refrigerator. My wife is in love with all the hanging lockers, although they come at the expense of other drawer and cubby space… one or two would probably have to be converted with shelves or something similar. The storage in general is just good, not great, but the openness of the interior lends itself to other, more flexible storage solutions, and I like that.

I’m not as thrilled that the head is forward, tucked up next to the oversized mast abaft the v-berth… it is a long way forward and the broad, flat bottom looks like it could pound in a seaway, making a stint on the throne challenging and potentially nausea-inducing. There is no separate shower stall, which shouldn’t come as a surprise in a 36 footer but somehow does considering all the interior space available. In two days of looking at the boat, we were unable to locate the holding tank. In some respects, that’s good: if there is something I don’t want to have to see regularly it is a tub of effluent. On the other hand, it’s also something you want to be able to repair easily should repairs be necessary. No one seems to know where it is or how much it holds.

On deck, there is a good-sized cockpit locker and not a lot else. Two winches on the cabin top under the dodger comprise the entirety of the boat’s mechanical advantages, and all lines are led to them from the mast. As you might expect with an unstayed rig, the decks are broad and accessible. Really, it seems like a lot of wasted space, although obviously the deck is performing vital work keeping water and weather out of the interior. Perhaps we could build a greenhouse up there.

The anchor locker is inaccessible from on deck, instead opening directly into the v-berth, which I consider a big strike… there is no wash down system so it seems inevitable that stinky mud and small bottom creatures are going to end up gracing the foot of our berth at some point. There’s also no way to stow a second anchor there for easy access from on deck, or to get at the windlass from outside, or unkink the rode while dropping the anchor. I know these are ancient problems and this is a conventional design, but having seen better, it’s difficult to adjust. I suppose that whole arrangement could be converted at some point but the area does not lend itself to easy modification.

On this particular boat, the electronics are a little dated and the sails probably due for replacement, but those are relatively small things. I suspect the wheel pilot that is installed is under-sized for the job of handling the helm in anything other than settled conditions.

On the plus side, the vessel appears to have been reasonably well taken care of. We can update outdated, but outright neglect is harder to correct. The listing broker was the second owner, was good friends with the original owner, and consequently was able to provide a considerable amount of detail about the vessel, something we appreciate after looking at boat after boat about which questions elicit only uncomfortable shrugs from the brokers.

The Freedom would be an interesting choice that could keep us from having to go scour California for other options, and we’re intrigued.

Performance
These boats are novel enough that we’re not sure exactly what to expect in terms of performance. It’s generally agreed that they don’t go to weather particularly well but opinions appear to be divided on whether the self-tacking rig and a healthy tracking ability make up for that deficiency. Bob Perry tells a brief tale of going head-to-head against one in a Valiant 40 once and coming out about even, and the Valiant still stands tall in the performance cruiser community. The SA/D ratio looks promising, but it’s kind of a fat hull, so it’s difficult for me to predict light air performance either. The numbers are a little frightening when one looks at the cap screen, motion comfort, roll frequency, and roll acceleration… it looks like it might bob around like a cork in light winds and swells, which could make for some pretty unpleasant days on passage.

Layout
The layout is acceptable bordering on good. On deck there is plenty of room to roam, although little reason to do so with a lines lead aft. Below, the cabin is vast, and we like the wet locker, aft cabin, and nav station. The galley is okay, but the location of the head near the bow is a big minus, together with the lack of a separate shower stall. Most internal systems appear to be easily accessible, however; we’re told the interior was stick built so it should be possible to get pretty much everything off in a pinch.

Storage
Storage is decent but not great. For a 36 footer it’s better than you might expect, and the open space in the interior could easily have additional storage added with very little effort. There are scads of hanging lockers, apparently at the expense of drawers, but some sort of shelving could be installed to remedy that deficiency.

Compromises
The extra space comes at the price of a cap screen value over two… not generally recommended for open ocean cruising. The high initial stability will make for a fairly stiff boat in most circumstances, but could make for a rough ride after the limits are exceeded. The novel rig provides easy handling and good speed on most points of sail, but it comes with substantial unknowns and some limitations. There are some inherent limitations to going with a relatively expensive boat that is only three feet longer than our last boat, but on the plus side, it will fit in our current slip, and ongoing costs won’t be as high as with the various 40 footers we have been looking at. Because of the broad beam and our recent experiences on a much narrower 33 footer, it’s still going to seem pretty palatial… but it’s an open question whether or not we’ll be as impressed after a couple years aboard.

One of the unexpected benefits of procrastinating in your boat search is that new boats pop up all the time. Perhaps because so many of the boats we have seen have been sitting on the market for so long, we forgot about this entirely and were starting to think of that big brown page at Yachtworld as if it were carved in stone. Having seen everything in the Pacific Northwest listed there that we wanted to see, all we could think about was getting to California to check out models that weren’t available for viewing up here.

But as we have been sitting around waiting for Mandy’s ankle to improve, new options have been popping up on the market locally. Two that appeared last week were another model that has long been on my list to check into: the C&C Landfall 38.

An early eighties foray into the cruising market, the Landfall earned the derogatory nickname “Landfill” from racers who didn’t appreciate the cut-down keel and re-worked interior of the otherwise respectable C&C 38. The unconventional combination didn’t seem to catch on with the cruising market, either, and the series was discontinued in the mid-eighties.

Since I have a weakness for C&Cs but a wife who dislikes the austerity of the racers, this model seemed like it might be a good one for us to look at. The relative age also put it right in our price range, another bonus. On the other hand, it also made even the newest of the Landfalls older than anything else we were looking at.

The one we checked out last week looked every bit its age and then some. A repo sitting wedged into an industrial section of the Ship Canal, she looked lonely amid all the bustle as other boats around her were being buffed and cleaned and readied for spring. A loose halyard swung un-noticed over the foredeck. A couple of rags and a bottle of cleaning solution sat in the cockpit, weapons laid down honorably after a losing battle against mold and grime or dropped in fear during a hasty retreat, we couldn’t tell which.

The interior was even worse. We arrived just after a heavy downpour (our favorite conditions for looking at boats), and it was almost as wet inside as out. Drips came from every quarter. Peering through one of the many gaps in the overhead, I could see the rotting deck core oozing out. In the bow, beneath the v-berth, a vast patch of what looked like fiberglass over foam lurched up out of the hull. The hulls in these, like most C&Cs, are balsa cored, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine what a foam patch might mean, or what sort of dramatic event had occasioned that installation.

The Landfalls have a unique interior layout. The companionway drops directly into the aft cabin, which typically contains a quarter-berth and the nav station (this particular boat was missing the nav station). A bulkhead immediately forward separates the cabin from the main salon. Passing through the door, the galley is to port and head to starboard. Forward of those the layout becomes more conventional, with a table-dominated salon and v-berth at the bow.

The galley has a good deal of storage and storage through the rest of the vessel is adequate. I liked the position of the head but there was no separate shower stall. The space where the nav station should be looked a little smaller than I had imagined it might. Since I couldn’t sit down and check it for desk space, I wasn’t able to decided whether or not the area would function for me as a work space.

There are real pluses and minuses to the odd layout. The aft cabin fills one of Mandy’s “very much want to have” items, but on the other hand, there’s no privacy with it… anyone heading forward from the cockpit or aft from the main cabin has to pass through it. On the other hand, having the nav desk walled off from the main cabin provides some peace and quiet for the off-watch if they are trying to eat or get some sleep in the main cabin. Of course, you still have to go forward to use the head. Or get a snack. I’m not really sure what I think about it yet.

Everything up top is pretty conventional C&C, the rod-rigging, wire halyards, sensible deck layout. The cut-down keel fin probably doesn’t do her any favors upwind, but you would have no trouble cruising any part of the world drawing only five feet.

On the whole, I don’t think we were impressed enough by the design to look at the other one for sale here right now.

Performance
Probably better than the average cruiser, probably worse than pretty much everything else we are looking at. Not a winner in this column.

Layout
I don’t want to say I am seeking an innovative layout and then wuss out when I finally find one, but although this is different, I’m not sure it’s good. Could go either way, probably you would have to live with it to find out.

Storage
Generally good; has sizeable deck-accessible storage spaces, very good galley storage, and reasonable interior storage space. Neither a clear winner nor loser on this front.

Compromises
This one is packed with compromises, but it’s difficult to say what is compromising what without actual experience on-board. Is the aft cabin compromised because it’s open to the companionway, or is it a bonus feature and other boats are compromises because they don’t afford that ability to cordon off the main cabin? Is the shoal draft a virtue allowing access to more cruising grounds, or a hindrance that prevents you from working to windward quickly? I’m not sure I would ever know without actually owning the boat.

Having exhausted every option in our size and price range in the Puget Sound region, Mandy and I decided to take advantage of a business trip she had already scheduled to Vancouver BC last week to check out some sailboats in the Great White North.

Our expectations were fairly low; the economy has been better in Canada and much of the demand in the Puget Sound region that has kept prices relatively high compared to the rest of the country has been attributed by various brokers we have spoken with to Canadian buyers coming south searching for boat bargains… factors pointing to a pretty strong market north of the border, and therefore an unlikely place to find any likely candidates in our price range.

Technically speaking, the Canadian Sailcraft 40 we found isn’t in our price range. With a little negotiation we might get it there, though, and it could be well worth pursuing because it has become the sleeper hit of our search efforts.

There are not very many CS 40s running around out there and neither of us were familiar with the company or their boats before we starting looking at this one. I was expecting the usual: tired production cruiser with all the conventional choices and underwhelming history and performance.

What I found was a well-built, exceptionally well-maintained performance cruiser with a racehorse pedigree and a thoughtful, practical layout both on deck and below.

Designed by Tony Castro based in part on his one-tonner Southern Ocean racer Blade, the CS 40 has all the hallmarks of a design that will register at the sprightly end of the 40 foot cruiser range. With so few of them out there, it’s difficult to ascertain any sort of reputation, but the SA/D ratio is promising and what little I have found posted by owners is encouraging.

I also found some suggestions that the build quality was not particularly high, but from what we could see during our brief inspection, that was not the case at all. A chemically bonded hull/deck join, accessibly thru-hulls and systems, and beefy rod rigging all speak to some degree of attention to detail during manufacture. Moreover, the particular vessel we looked at was immaculate below; a bilge you could happily serve soup out of, no grime to speak of behind any of the access panels, clean, neatly run plumbing and electrical updates, all point to an owner with a serious approach to upkeep. Although the fancy electronic systems are aging quickly, to me it spoke well that all the basics were being taken care of first. The most recent involved plumbing and rigging upgrades and new batteries. Equally important to the recent upgrades was the overall pattern of the updates… installed at intervals over the past decades, they showed the hallmark of an active owner maintaining a working boat, rather than the cash dump in the last year or two that frequently indicates an owner trying to shine up a turd for quick sale.

The layout below didn’t hit 100% on our demanding wish list, but it got high marks nonetheless. The galley is deep and flush with storage, including what amounts to a half-height pantry against the aft bulkhead, nicely organized with sliding baskets… a touch we valued on our last boat that we hadn’t seen on another since.

The nav desk is large enough to be useable and provides a seat secure enough to use in a seaway. The rest of the main cabin offers no surprises with a fairly conventional drop-leaf-table-flanked-by-settees layout and a moderate amount of storage. The head, forward, does not have separate shower stall, but otherwise is appropriately laid-out. The v-berth has additional storage and plenty of head and foot room; as a plus, it’s sealed off from the anchor locker entirely.

The aft cabin provided the perfect compromise between the lavish spaciousness of the C&C 37+ aft cabin and the tight, barely-adapted enclosed quarter-berth of the Ericson 38. Without taking up considerably greater hull space than the Ericson aft cabin, the CS 40 somehow manages to still make the cabin look like a real, useable cabin rather than a walled-off pipe berth. Additionally, it provided an almost perfect seat and space for an office for me… a unique (albeit unintentional) feature among vessels we have viewed.

Because (and unlike the 37+) the cabin does not extend across the breadth of the vessel, however, there is still room for a substantial cockpit locker on the port side. Accessible from both cockpit and a smallish door in the galley bulkhead, this locker offers the perfect place to keep deck gear and spare sails without having to drag them back and forth through the cabin when needed. This is the best compromise we have found between lavish interior space and a useable, easily-managed deck layout.

Performance
This is the big question; she looks like she could be fast, and we’ve had a couple of comments from folks who claim to have once known a guy whose cousin had a girlfriend whose father once said he thought he saw one go like greased lightning, but we haven’t found anyone with first-hand experience sailing them to give us the skinny. If you happen to be one of those rare folks with some sail time aboard a CS 40, please comment! We’d love to hear more.

Layout
The interior layout is a mixed bag; Mandy is fairly well set on something with a separate aft cabin by now, and this has one but it doesn’t light her up the way the cabin on the 37+ does. I quite like it, as it would be excellent office space for me. Neither of us are all that thrilled that the head is forward and doesn’t have a separate shower stall. We are used to not having a shower stall, but we would have to adapt something to work as a wet locker further aft, and in general the combined absence is a black mark against the model. We’re not thrilled about the conventional layout of the salon either but expect we’ll have to live with something similar since so few boats offer a real alternative in that area.

Storage
Voluminous! This boat has hands-down the best interior storage of any we have looked at so far, particularly in the galley space. It manages to achieve this without dramatically impacting deck storage, which has been a drawback on other models we have seen. The cockpit lockers are not vast, but they are adequate and useable and we think this is generally the best example of balance between the two that we have seen so far.

Compromises
The head is the obvious big compromise on this model, and the price is just about out of our range. Given the relatively robust Canadian economy, it’s less likely we could bargain it down than with some of the boats down here in the States. We have recently been discussing the long-term impact of the pricing on our plans, as well. There is something to be said with leaving a chunk of change in the bank by buying something at the low-end of our price range so we have cash on hand for both some of the inevitable modifications and more flexibility to be out cruising instead of at the dock working. Of everything we have looked at, this boat may be the best kept and outfitted to sail away from the brokerage and cruise to Alaska with minimal modification, however, so we’re still undecided on that point.

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Ericson 38-200. Last year, when Mandy and I were first beginning to realize that we needed to move up a couple of boat sizes, the E38-200 was the first model we found that gave us some hope that we could find the qualities and layout we were looking for and still stay within our modest price range. A soundly built boat with the interior layout we were looking for, reputed to have a reasonable turn of speed for a cruising vessel, lines that didn’t make us cringe, and with the storage and comforts that a 38 footer ought to have, the 38-200 was a ray of sunshine in those dark days of picking amongst the detritus of experiments from the 70s and 80s gone wrong.

There are a lot of Ericson 38s out there, and the -200 is the penultimate form. The primary changes to the line over the years have been to the interior. That goes some ways toward suggesting that designer Bruce King pegged the sailing qualities right on the first try. The 5’3″ shoal keel was originally standard but the deeper, better-performing 6’5″ seems to have become more popular on later versions and those are most of what we have seen on the market recently. The interior tweaks have all been for the better, so that the -200 has our much-desired aft head (with small, but serviceable separate shower stall) and a reasonable aft cabin. The table doesn’t fold away but neither does it intrude on the main fore/aft path through the cabin. The tankage is reasonable, by our standards, but does not detract from considerable storage space remaining throughout the interior. The brand has a following which, if not quite as rabid as the C&C junkies, still maintain an active and helpful website that can be immensely valuable to new owners. In short, the design fits well within our range of desired compromises and has some additional attractions outside that scale.

Unfortunately, the one we looked at originally was pretty well trashed… significant signs of water intrusion, leaking oil, heavy water damage to the sole, plumbing problems, ports that needed replacing and rebedding, an interior that was frankly just plain dirty, and an asking price out of touch with the reality of that situation. Had we sold our own boat yet at that point, we might have made a very low offer on it, but it wasn’t hard to walk away because the model is moderately prolific… the Ericson 38 came out in 1980 and the -200 version was introduced in 1986 and continued to roll off the line until 1998 courtesy of Pacific Seacraft, which bought Ericson in 1990. We didn’t have any trouble imagining those sister ships would be getting all the attention while this dog sat and grew moss for a few years.

Unbelievably, to us, someone actually bought the thing a couple of months later.

Most of the rest of them live in California or on the East Coast and we expected to have to take a trip to see one with a loaded checkbook in hand. Unexpectedly, however, the very boat we looked at last fall popped up on the market again suddenly last week. Was it too much of a project, we wondered? A newly inflated price tag suggested otherwise; perhaps she had fallen into the hands of a flipper, a mad venture in this market but then most boaters are mad to varying degrees. Either way, it was worth a trip up to Everett if only to sate our morbid curiousity, so we headed up for another look.

It turned out the buyer was a first-time sailboat owner who had since had a change of personal circumstances. A diesel mechanic by trade, he is the ideal previous owner… handy and attentive enough to have cleaned her up considerably and made numerous small repairs and upgrades, yet without enough time on his hands to have taken her out and put more wear and tear on her. Dropping down the companionway ladder this time was like stepping into a whole different boat. The sole had been repaired; much of the plumbing replaced; engine oil leaks repaired; the crazed cabin windows in the process of being replaced. He’d even taken a vacuum cleaner to her.

Much of what he had done was either cosmetic or relatively minor, however, and when you’re looking at a twenty year old boat, those are the cheap things to fix. We often look at general cleanliness and the small things as a proxy for the general level of care exhibited by the owner that would be likely to have carried over into the major things; in this case, though, we knew that the short span of loving care that she had been lavished with since December wasn’t going to make up for the years of neglect prior to that.

One of the benefits of checking out a boat that has changed hands recently is that you can usually get a look at a recent survey. We have become connoisseurs of sailboat surveys recently, and there are two kinds: useful surveys that tell you what is really going on with a given vessel, and paint-by-the-number surveys that exist primarily as an excuse to get something insured or a loan issued. You can usually spot the latter quickly by their use of big blocks of boilerplate punctuated by a few uninformative notes regarding trivialities such as flare replacement and light-bulbs having burnt out.

The one we were handed for this boat didn’t even catch the lightbulbs. Nor did it cover a number of other, more serious problems with hull or rig that we picked out within the first few minutes on deck (thanks, Brion!). However, any boat this age that hasn’t already had the work done is probably going to need the rigging replaced, and the coaming cracks are not structural problems (although one pesky crack at the bow extends back and out of sight behind the rub rail… exactly where the hull/deck join is in these boats).

All other things being equal, if we’d first laid eyes on this particular boat last week, we would have been inclined to put in an offer. We like the model and this one is not exorbitantly overpriced, although it is above the general range. But there are three others for sale right now down in California, each of them priced low enough to pay the difference in the cost of shipping them north, and of those, two are one or two owner boats with all the hallmarks of regular attention… small modifications to the interior or deck that tell you they have been owned by someone with an interest in maintenance. That sort of attention, over the long term, is far more valuable to us than any recent repairs or upgrades.

So, as much as it pains us to turn our backs on something so close to home, we’re probably going to pass on that one. Ignorance probably would have been bliss, but I’m confident we’ll be better off in the long run.

Performance
Reputed to point well and balance nicely, the Ericson 38 is nonetheless light enough to move along in light airs. They have something of a reputation of being excessively tender, which the current owner and a neighbor down the dock inadvertently reinforced when they mentioned they had buried the rail a couple weeks ago while out in ten knots of wind.

Layout
Although the basic shape of the interior layout comports well with our vision, some of the particulars will require adjustment; there is no ready-made desk space and some solution would have to be fashioned in one or the other of the cabins for my work station. The nav desk, as per usual, is postage-stamp sized and relatively worthless.

Storage
Storage, at least, is stellar. There is a nice combination of large and small spaces throughout the interior that could easily accomodate all our current junk and just about every other conceivable sort of junk we might buy. Storage space in the galley is somewhat light, but that is in our view obviated by the spaces available elsewhere. It’s only 38 feet, not like it would be a long walk to get the salt shaker if we had to stow it in the nav desk (and that may be all the nav desk is good for on this boat).

Compromises
There are not really too many compromises we would have to make for the Ericson; she has high marks in just about every category that is important to us. One significant concern is the embedded tie rod terminals; we like that the boat has a reinforced structural grid internally, but the tie rods between the deck chainplates and that grid are deeply embedded in fiberglass. There is no way to inspect the aluminum blocks that the rods thread into. While this arrangement should prove massively strong, and could be quite secure if there has been no water intrusion over the years, we know that the owner prior to this one didn’t keep up with developing leaks, and there is no real way of knowing what might have seeped down into those threads over the years. There would be some risk of that with any of these boats, but more with this one in particular.