hardin ketch rotten bulkheads

[smurphny]

A couple of things to consider might be the draft and length. If you're going to cruise around the Bahamas or Caribbean, there are a lot of places you can get into with a shoal draft/swing keel type boat. I'm planning a trip to the Bahamas next season and it looks like my 5'-6" draft will keep me out of some spots (especially good hurricane holes). Length is also a consideration because it costs more for one thing and it is sometimes easier to find a spot with a shorter length. When you think about single-handing, when the boat gets over around 35' just the weight and mass of things makes it more difficult to handle them alone. You sail the same waters I have always sailed in both powerboats and sailboats. We are in a great place to sail: MV, Block, Newport, LI forks area, The Cape, and up to Maine are all awesome places for sailing.

On the idea of group sailing, I have found that it is much more difficult with sailboats, especially over long distances because of speed differentials. I used to go to Block from PJ every year with a bunch of buddies in powerboats. No problem, we all went about the same speed and the time was only different by minutes, not hours. With sailboats, the going is much slower and it takes a comparatively long time to get anywhere. Sailboats moving even a couple of knots different speed will soon lose each other over the horizon in a few hours. HF radio nets are helpful for info on weather, safety issues, and other conditions where you are headed but actually sailing with others is difficult unless the boats are almost identical and even then sailing ability will soon separate the boats over time.

[Faster]

What smurph says about relative speeds is true enough, but what we've found is that often see the same boats at the next destination as the harbour we left, regardless of sail or power. It's a matter of time of departure/enroute/arrival.

We've done lots of flotilla coastal cruising with a wide variety of boats, mostly sail, and at most there may be a 2 hour difference between the first and last to arrive (on, say, a 20-25 NM leg). This actually works better if you're rafting up, it's much easier to build a raft with a boat coming in every half hour or so than to have 15 boats milling around waiting to get in. It's a great social time... some of our rafts are so large that it's much quicker to visit by dinghy than tramp across the boats!



Of course, group cruising offshore would be very different unless you're back to day trips like island hopping in the Caribbean or Bahamas... Rafting is uncommon there too..