Advice for Newbies please

Hi again..in my first post I said that I was in favour of heavy displacement long keeled boats for cruising- or a decent catamaran. The reason I mentioned the multihull is that being a sailing wife I know how few of the female friends in our sailing club really like sailing. Often it is the way the boat tips over that scares them....and being wet and miserable. We have a few cats in the club now, and it is noticeable that the ladies who didn't like it before are happier to cruise on a more stable platform with decent living room that doesn't perform on its ear and a sheltered helm position! Thats not to say that cats don't have some motion (an odd one to those who sail mono hulls)it's just different. And quite often the best parties seem to develop in the cockpits of these boats.....Favoured in this area (Bristol Channel) are Catalacs as they are relatively heavy and good load carriers as well as being well built and pretty cheap for the amount of living space. However, sailing performance except in free winds leaves a lot to be desired and means resorting to the iron topsails quite a lot. Two of them, are off to the Med through the canals next spring.

If sailing 'properly' is your ladies bag, go for the heavy displacement boat rather than a modern cruiser racer; at sea the difference can be summed up as sailing a feather bed as opposed to sleeping on a hard floor!

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Having done a lot of cruising on various boats of all sizes, from my own 28footer to my parents 60footer, i have found one book an absolute bible along the way, Cruising on Serrafyn' by Lin and larry Pardy, is a truly honest book about cruising, budget, size of boat, and Lin pardys advice, which is a statement i personally have found true is, go small, go cheap, go now.
But read the book! It will spur you on!
Good luck

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There's a lot of good advice in there. I agree with the 'go small, go now' philosophy of the Pardeys, and their advice seems generally good, but bear in mind that Larry Pardey is a talented traditional wooden boatbuilder, and Lynn is about four feet tall, so the advice regarding tiny plank-on-frame wooden boats is not for everyone.
Something I haven't seen mentioned is shopping for a boat that is at the end of a cruise similar to what you propose. It's already fitted out for voyaging, whereas most boats are really only yuppy weekenders. Most people underestimate the costs of converting a weekender into a voyager, which can easily add 20-50% to the cost. An added bonus is that you'll get to meet couples that have already done it.
With regards to materials, it's best to go with what you're familiar with. Steel leaves me cold, but if you're accustomed to working with metal, and not wood, then it's a no brainer. Likewise, if you have no interest in woodwork, then GRP might be the way to go. Aluminium is a good material, but it's difficult to repair, prone to fatal electrolysis, and fatigues like nobody's business. As far as I can tell, ferrocement has no redeeming features, but 'm sure there are some who disagree. I consider it to be one of those unfortunate artifacts of the '70's, like glam rock and disco.
I'm one of the weirdos that thinks that junk rigs are the best thing since bottled beer (what can I say, I'm an aussie :) ), but they're not common, and if resale is an issue then they might not suit. Just about any rig or configuration will do the job, but try to avoid excessive 'Shiny Things'(TM) that look great but are expensive to replace, and unavailable in most of the world. Same with electronics, fridges, freezers, generators etc. No one ever sank from conservatism, and at sea is probably the only place on earth where it's not a crime against humanity :)
If you go for a proven design that has already cruised extensively, have a surveyor give it the once over, and take it slowly, then you shouldn't have too much trouble.
A last word of advice, from LFH - "If you want all the comforts of home, then stay there."

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Re:Ferro

As a ferro builder and owner, I can't let you get away with that! I agree that there are some bad ones out there, but the good ones can't be told apart from other building materials. Their main advantage is that they are second only to steel boats for strength, and for a buyer, because of people like you giving them bad press they have a serious advantage in that their resale value is small. i.e. you get a lot of boat for your money - and the good ones are usually fitted out by serious sailors for serious cruising. As with any other material, the answer is to get a good survey before parting with your hard earned. And, if necessary (Heaven forbid) they are also easy to repair in god forsaken spots with readily availible materials - read my previous post on the subject in 'what material'.

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I'd like to do the same thing in about a decade when the kids have left home.

In looking at different boats you may find the following site interesting - it has a large database of different boats and you can use it to compare them - stats like capsize ratio etc.

You can also type in the relevant figures for any boats not listed and it will churn out various stats:

http://image-ination.com/sailcalc.html

Happy hunting

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Why?

Is this really that important?

Which begs the interesting question, if one is going to offer just a single item of advice about choosing a long-distance cruiser, what is the most important thing to mention ? I think my answer would be 'stability'.
 
jeanne - yes it's true that there are some good ferro boats around, but they seem to be in the minority. I don't know about you, but when I was growing up the ratty looking wire cages that wanted to be boats when they grew up were sprouting on every street corner. Most of them never made it into the water, and of those that did, most were lumpy twisted parodies of the owner's dreams. Ferro boats broke a lot of hearts, their used-car-salesman style promoters making unrealistic claims that were not borne out by reality.
I agree that a soundly built ferro boat can be a bargain, and do the job as well as any other. However, there will probably always be a stigma attached to them as a result of all the broken dreams and unscrupulous promoters. I'd prefer to avoid them, but then I like wooden boats, so who am I to throw stones? :)

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OK - but perhaps in Australia there were more unfinished projects than here in UK. We were lucky in that in my area (Bristol Channel), when we were building 20 years ago, was a hotbed of experience in this material ...also, all our friends in our sailing club had plastered several boats thus knowing what was necessary, and we had fantastic professional plasterers who were real artists. Our boat was surveyed from bare garden to finished boat (including plastering day). We built two alongside one another, and the surveyor said he would be happy to use our efforts as a standard for the future. Plus, at that time there was a professional builder in UK, Windboats, who made ferro boats to Lloyds spec, mostly the Endurance, whose owners, like us, must be saddened by this bad press. I'll allow that there are some I wouldn't touch with a bargepole, but so there are of every other material - especially wood. Even unlovely ferro creations are usually strong, and if not, any surveyor would soon find this out.

As I said, a good ferro boat represents tremendous value for money. And the designs are usually the type with good seakeeping ability and comfort.

Sorry to have hi-jacked this post with a ferro discussion, but I was trying only to give the same view as many others, do it now, go cheap!

In fact, my personal choice of materials for a cruising boat, for strength and ease of maintenance, would go as follows: Steel, aluminium, ferro, GRP, wood.

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We retired last year at 55 and moved aboard our boat (Bavaria 38).
We crossed Atlantic with the ARC and at present our boat is on the hard in Grenada while we have returned to the UK for a couple of months. Our boat is just about big enough for us and 2 occasional guests. We don't have room for a generator or freezer but these seem to cause so many problems for others that we are probably quite fortunate. An almost constant topic amongst cruisers we meet is power consumption. Even people with trouble free generators, are fed up servicing them every 25 days or so. We are very pleased with our Airmarine X wind generator but it is noisy. Our other best buy is our watermaker. We bought a Schenker, and it makes water at 30L an hour without having to resort to the engine.
Like you we left home with very little experience having only had a boat for three years, but we are having a marvellous time. The boat coped with the rough weather across the Atlantic incredibly well, being steered by our Windpilot, and with some very "exciting" interisland passages. We, and many others, are doing it on a budget in production boats. Insurance costs are high but having a modern boat keeps them more reasonable, something to bear in mind if you are buying something old and heavy displacement.

Good luck, go for it!

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My first boat was a clinker built double ended folkboat type sloop built in 1946. I then bought a 36 foot ketch. A gentleman's racing boat from the 1930's built by Kings. Most recently I bought a 31foot ferro-cement smack. The wooden boats were lovely things of great beauty, the ferro boat is beautiful in a different way; it is incredibly strong, and the hull is as fair as you could imagine, but also it was incredibly cheap to buy and incredibly cheap to maintain. I'm not converted to Ferro, but they do have huge pluses in their favour, price being only one. They are harder to insure and sell but a well made hull (mine was professionally built) should look no different from GRP or wood. The first ferro boat was made in the Napoleonic era and is still afloat.

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Re: What type of rig & hull material?

My wife and have lived on and off boats of variou types for a number of years.
Here are some things we have concluded.
The ideal hull design is full keeled for too many reasons to go into here.
Hull material is steel hard chined.
Lenght is 34' for two people. After about 34' your ability to handle the boat diminishes with every foot increase. Every aspect of the boat gets heavier/more expensive/more complicated/more hassle/more everything that you Don't want in a liveaboard/cruising life style.
Forget the junk rig! We have met lots of people who have junk rigs. The rig will not go to windward no matter what anyone claims. I've never met anyone who actually sails a junk rig who says it will. The best rig is your basic sloop. All sails inboard. The main on a 34' is reaching the limit a couple can handle in a seaway.
These are just our opinions though.
There are lots of different ones and if you can get a lot of sailing in before you commit to the liveaboard life you will of course evolve your own ones.
Best of luck.
Just do it sooner than later. Tommorow never comes does it?

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