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Originally Posted by k1vsk
To summarize this discussion:
1.Everybody likes the boat they have.
2.Most people are critical of their previous boats which they sold.
3.Everyone thinks their boat is better than the competitors'
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Not true for me. I know that the virtues of my boat for passagemaking come nowhere near the "flaws" of being relatively undercanvassed and possessing a fullish keel and a transom-rudder, neither of which can ever be as "slippy" as a fin keeler with flat sections.
But a rare application demands a rare boat. Having an ocean-style, old-school tub doesn't preclude gunkholing or Caribbean island hopping (and I dare say at five foot eight in draft, we are going to get in some places the J-boats aren't), but it does mean I'll never set speed records.
I can live with that. I've had a hot rod racer and I'll have one again. If I had a few million to throw around, I could have a Moody or a Swan or some other "performance cruiser" that can produce...at a price...the sort of fast but tough ideal we all might choose.
But I thought that it's better to go safely and a bit more slowly in a boat that can take a coral grounding and can be careened on a beach and can be run in extreme weather and that has the room to carry a lot of robust systems (fuel, batteries, ground tackle) than to go in the wrong boat today or the right boat when I'm too old.
I found it informative to my plans when I bought my custom steel ocean boat to learn that neither the original owner, who commissioned the design and hired the builder, nor the second owner, whose wife got a pensioned job they couldn't refuse, ever took the boat out of the Great Lakes. When I was shopping for bluewater cruisers, time and time again I encountered the dedicated and skilled builder or rebuilder who finally brought the boat to a state approaching perfection, only to realize that he was too old or sick to do his dream trip.
This showed me that time and not money is the bigger factor in one's cruising ambitions. The point is to go before you can't, if going is what you want to do.