My husband and I love our boat. If you live in Florida or plan to be here, you really should go to the Caliber factory in Clearwater. Email Kathy at
LRCCaliber@aol.com to arrange a tour. They are happy to show off their boats. When we were looking to purchase our boat, we narrowed it down to Calibers and IPs. It's a tough call between the two - they are both very respectible builders, and in fact, our first offer was on an IP but the sale did not go through. In retrospect, I am glad that we ended up with a Caliber. They are a smaller company and being an owner is like being part of a family. As for build-quality plusses over the IP, here's some things we preferred on the Caliber: visable chainplates tied to bulkheads, IP's have strange helm seats due to direct drive steering, interior finish (IMO) is better on Caliber, separate nav station and crash bulkhead on Calibers. Our Caliber is pre LRCC, so we don't have the large tankage and redundant systems that the new ones have. Would be nice, but it was out of our $$. Also, ours doesn't have the swim step or cutter rig (but we could add that). Other than that, it is basically the same boat - made from the same mold they use today. It is good to know that our 16 y/o boat is still in production - that says a lot for the product. and she still looks great! 90% of the people that walk by our boat stop and comment on how pretty she is. She is a great boat to sail - we consistantly sail 6.5 - 7 knots and have reached 8 on a good downwind run. With decent wind, we pass benes, catalinas, hunters, and other lightweight fin keels. She is stiff enough to stand up to a good breeze while lighter weight boats are sailing on their rails. We have sailed in 20+ knot winds with full canvas.
We have recently had problems with our strut and are working with Caliber to get the parts to put her back together. Since they still make the boat, getting parts is not difficult. Caliber has inspected our boat/parts and spent nearly a whole day with us trouble shooting and helping us decide what to do. The breakdown was not Caliber's fault and not in anyway related to the design (but I don't want to get into that b/c there are people on this bb that want to argue about it). Ours is the only Caliber that has had this type of breakdown. In any event, I don't know of any other production boat builder that would have done this on one of their 16 year old boats. I can't say enough about their customer service. Did I mention that I love our boat?