I have to weigh in with the others on this. My sense of the Bavaria''s is pretty much as the others have noted, Crawling around the bowels of one, the glass work looks poorly done with comparatively wide spread use of non-directional fabrics, dubious construction details and not particularly well developed
rig and hull designs. They are cheap to buy but I would hate to own one. I was on a roughly 3 year old one last summer and was amazed at how beat up this boat looked. Obviously this is way too small a sampling to tell anything about the long term prospects of a whole
line of boats especially since I do not know any details of the boat''s history.
My sense is that you would be much better served with boats like the Elans, Hanse, Dehlers, Beneteau First Series or with a bit more budget with something like a Tartan, Sabre, J-boat cruising series. Even Hunters, Catalinas and Beneteau''s number series seem to be better constructed and detailed than the Bavarias.
(A peince of me is particularly disappointed in the Bavarias,given their reliance on America''s stereotyping of anything German as somehow better made and their failure to deliver on that inference.)
Jack, one minor but not terribly relevant point, as far as I know, the Beneteau group is the largest producers of sailboats in the world pretty much dwarfing the other companies. The last statistics that I saw, thier porduction was greater than Hunter and Catalina combined. At that time Bavarias were a pretty distant second place in the European marketplace. What I don''t know is whether the published numbers were for all of Beneteaus'' many divisions and multiple worldwide production facilities. Do you have more up to date data that suggests that Bavaria has passed Beneteau somehow?
Jeff