Quote:
Originally Posted by treilley
My wife and I are looking for a live aboard boat in the 40-50ft. range that can take us off shore in the coming years. We have looked at larger CC boats but have not been impressed with the ones in our budget. We are now considering smaller, newer boats that may require a little less work although I plan to personally go through every system to ensure proper installation and service.
We are planning on spending $200k with an additional $50k for repairs and upgrades.
I have perused the archives and read the responses to past inquiries on Calibers.
I am looking for current info on this boat including pros, cons, etc.
Please only respond if you have direct experience owning or sailing on one of these boats.
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I flew to George Town to bring back a 40'Caliber LRC called Air Born.This was the third one the owner had fitted out I believe and it is for sale or was for sale.
This particular one was fitted out extremely well as the owner improved on his idea of what a great cruising boat , in his mind , should be and this being his third attempt worked for me.All the functions of sail trim could be handled from the cockpit except for the third reef in the main.The main was a battened hank on system.The Jib and staysil were both roller furling.
The boat carried 212 gallons of fuel in two tanks that are built into the boat.There was a refresher pump system which was nicely thought out as you could pump fuel out of the #1 tank to run it though a double filter/double racor and return it to tank one or pump it into tank #2 or vice versa.There was a vacuum gauge in the cockpit letting you know how dirty the filter system was as well actually.We actually had a problem with the pick up , I am assuming this as all of a sudden the motor just quit , on Tank # 1 and to circumvent this happening again we transferred fuel to tank #2 as we switched the system to tank #2 and the motor started back up as if nothing had happened.
The boat was pretty quiet down below except for the aft heads doors entrance creaked and groaned a bit. I put my fingers up on either side of the doors wall and I indeed could feel it move a bit.The owner was going to talk to Caliber about this when he got back to shore.
The boat sailed pretty well for a modified full keel .Going to weather it could hold 40 degrees off the wind well , any closer it seemed to lose power.( I was told it could do 30 degrees or so ,but it just started stalling a bit ) The auto helm was driving the boat when we were going to weather ( actually used the auto pilot a bit ) set using the wind as it's reference and the unit did a great job.
Off the wind it did well as well as we had a fair amount of wind for a time aft of the beam blowing like stink 25-30+ knots of wind and had a triple in the main and about 80% of the jib and the boat just hunkered down and went really well.
All in all for a cruising vessel it did rather well.Plenty of water,plenty of fuel,sea kindly action( sails fairly flat when trimmed out properly except when we decided to go dead into the wind)
Air Born had 4 solar panels with a blue sky control unit and it did really well charging the batteries.Raytheon system ,Radar,AIS,speed ,depth,ETC...
Icom VHF, ICOM SS Band.
Carry a whisker pole as we had none and it would have been useful dead down wind.The traveler track for the jib could of been a little longer in both directions as I ended up using extra blocks attached to the rail so we could trim the jib better.Those are the only things that I would have changed on the boat except for the creak I mentioned earlier.
Caliber makes a nice boat or at least this one was nicely done.
I hope this helps a bit.
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