The Search

Having decided to get a boat and chase after new horizons – literally and figuratively – we needed to figure out exactly what boat we wanted. Brainstorming session engaged, and after much researching, reading, and discussion we basically came up with the following non-exhaustive list of priorities (in no particular order):

·         Monohull,

·         At least 40 feet long,

·         Center Cockpit,

·         Dual head,

·         Fin keel w/ skeg hung rudder,

·         One stateroom with a queen sized bed,

·         Newish sails in good condition,

·         Newish (2018 or newer) navigational systems,

·         Some off-grid components in place (solar, watermaker, etc.),

·         Bluewater pedigree,

·         Documented endorsements by people who we respect in the sailing community,

·         Decent survey report, and

·         Within our budget!

(I am absolutely sure that I am forgetting parts of our priority list, but that list was created over a year ago and has long been erased from our whiteboard. I struggle to remember details from last week, much less a year ago.)

Anyone who has ever owned a boat knows that a boat is a floating compromise. It was unlikely that we’d find a single boat that checked every box on the list, but we managed to come up with a list of interesting boats. They included:

·         Kelley Peterson 44

·         Gulfstar 44 CC

·         Gulfstar 50 CC

·         Tayana 42 CC

·         Formosa 46

·         C&C Landfall

·         Morgan 41 Out Island

·         Hunter Passage 42 or 420

·         Hylas 44

As a quick aside, yes, we absolutely would love to have a catamaran. We are not sailing purists who believe that you must live life on the lean. A solid catamaran was simply out of the budget. If we had the money to seriously consider a cruising cat, we would have included them in our list of potential boats.

Out of our list, we made offers on the following boats (in chronological order) two KP 44s, a Tayana 42, a C&C Landfall, a Gulfstar 44 CC, and a Gulfstar 44. We got the Gulfstar 44 to survey, but that survey was a bit of an adventure – maybe we will talk about it sometime in the future, but today is not that day. We backed out of the Gulfstar 44 and turned our attention to a Gulfstar 50 CC ketch.