Boat Choice

[Guest]

Am in the happy position of early retirement (50), experienced sailor, yachtmaster Ocean/Instructor, etc. Considering Oyster 435 or similar for extended/Blue Water Cruising, nothing to prove/easy life anticipated. Any views or suggestions on boat choice for liveaboard(myself and wife) with occasional guests/family.

 

[snowleopard]

Good Choice

that's about the average size for couples on the ocean circuit these days, up to max of 50ft. the bigger the better for weight carrying as long as you can handle the gear. Oysters are obviously towards the top end of the market so ideal if you can afford it.

We reckon that with water, fuel and a year's gear for the two of us we've added around 1.5 tons to coastal cruising weight.

 

[Sybarite]

Have you looked at an Amel Super Maramu for the easy life ? Considered in France to be the Rolls Royce of boats and designed for single handling.

http://www.amel.fr/Anglais/sommaire.htm

Or a second hand Santorin which is a slightly smaller 14m version.

Or, if you want to really enjoy your sailing, a Finot Cigale 14m ? They design the Open 60's. (I like the dinghy stowage)

http://www.finot.com/bateaux/batproduction/alubat/cigale14/cigale14_ang.htm
Presented in franglais..
http://www.alubat.com/english/boats/cigale14.htm
http://www.guillou.com/alubat.htm (This one includes a touching story about a sailing father's love for his daughter...)

Lucky so & so.

John

 

[HaraldS]

Well I'm sure you get lots of responses and opinions, and I hesitated to add my piece of opinion, but since I was in almost exactly the same situation, retireing at 51, and choosing the 'right' boat. Made my decision 3 years ago, after much investigation, and never regretted it. Planning and the construction project tuned out to be almost as much fun as sailing.

Small difference was that I was aiming at somewhere around 50 ft, to get the load carrying capabilities, for all the comfort stuff plus spares, still having a boat that I could single hand and often sail just with my wife. But we also have kids and friends who love to come along so, some extra space for taking two or three more people was also needed.

We made a list of the top ten boats we would wanted to consider, and then chose to visit the top 5 yards to get a real feel.

Having been sailing since child, and been through a few boats, one also develops a certain amount of personal ideas and wishes, so the willingness to provide customization, was another must for the yard we would choose.

On the closer list of our choices were: Contest 48 and 55, Bowman 48, HR 53, Najad 490 and 520, Oyster 485 and 55, Solaris 50, Wauqiez 48, Amel Super Maramu.

Bowman 48, was high on the list, as we had previously owned a Rival 41 and really liked it. Also the yard would do any customization you may want. But it was on the low end of our size spectrum and I didn't like the hull design too much.

Oyster, certainly nice boats, didn't want to do customizations and from price versus quality felt overpriced when compared to some of the Swedish boats.

The Amel boat is a lot of value and very complete, but to my subjective mind had no soal. Extremely practical and many good ideas, but certainly no customization at all and very much of a caravan feeling.

On the Wauquiez I had quality and stability concerns. More after visting the yard, but most important, my wife didn't like the boat at all.

The Contest boats are nice, not exactly my taste from interior, and not really good performers, but all in all the 55 made it to place three.

At Najad we had first looked at the then a bit outdated 520, which broaught us to view the first 490 and it was love at first sight. I cannot explain that.

So the HR 53, which was on place one, with plenty of layout choices and a certain amount willingness of working in extras, had to relinquish the lead position to the Najad 490. Najad also does about any amount of custom work that is reasonable and all at quite reasonable pricing.

Now we have sailed the Najad for over 5000 miles and we love the boat, and we still enjoy a great relationship with the folks who built her. She met all expectations and exceeded my expectations in sailing perfornce. In particular when going to windward in a heavy sea.

So, my recomendation: Do at least have a closer look at the Najads.






http:// [url]www.taniwani.de [/url]

 

[Grehan]

Taniwani Online

Harald

I greatly enjoyed your website, which is excellent. Thanks for passing on your experiences.

I think you've now been cruising seriously in Taniwani for 3 years now . . [?]

How much equipment or fitting failure have you experienced in this time?
(For example, I'm thinking of the genoa halyard shackle that failed)
Defects of workmanship or manufacture, or just 'to be expected' things . . . ?
Things you've learnt from this?

Good luck to Beate and you.
Fair winds and following seas for 2003!


PS
-----------------------------
One small point . . . your pages have yellow text that depends for legibility on a background image that adds to the visual richness but does slow down downloading quite a lot, and the yellow text is then difficult to read against a white screen. You might consider a slightly plainer background that's a smaller file size and thus quicker to appear.

Apologies if this seems like 'nit-picking' - your site is good enough to make me want to explore all it, as smoothly as possible!
-----------------------------

 

[HaraldS]

Re: Taniwani Online

Grehan,

thanks for the nice words and your feedback. I didn't notice the slow loading being DSL spoilt. I'll rework this when I do the next bigger update. In the mean time I have just replaced the big background image, with a small monocolor image. So it should load faster now. Still, the many pictures will probably remain an issue with lower speed connections.

On the original topic:

Yes we have sailed Taniwani for 3 years now in quite differing conditions.

Equipment and fitting failures:

With a high tech boat that has about any gadget you can think of, obviously a certain amount of problems is to be expected.

Fitting failues have been on the low side and most equipment failures could be blamed on the original manufacturer. My yard has been extremely good in getting those vendors to follow up quickly and fix or replace what failed.

In the first year the list of equipment failures was very long with close to every well known brand on the list: Raymarine, Simrad, Balmar, Lofrans, Tecnicomar, MaxPower, Eberspächer, just to name a few. Each failure an interesting story in itself.

There were only a few things to blame the yard for, and most were fixed when I brought the boat back after the first season.

After three years these things are essentially ironed out.

This summer, the 3rd season, we had a lot more strain on the rig and started to discover some of the weaknesses in this area, especially since the rig loads are very high when beating into a stronger wind for several days.

After this experience I would probably choose the furler for the cutter stays sail a size bigger. It is a size 300S Furlex, whereas the Genoa has a size 400S furler. What I learned is, that with this cutter rig choice, the cutter sail is a great strom sail when furled, but the load on the equipment is than no less than a fully loaded genoa.

In our case the foreward most block of the reefing line, which is attached to the pullpit, broke in it's swivel, most likely because the reefing line made too sharp a turn towards the drum, and the small block just couldn't cope with that load. The chain reaction then was that the change in angle of the reefing line, put a rotating force on the drum and broke the housing, then the whole furler jammed, with too much sail up.

On the cutter sail, also the top shackle attaching the sail to the swivel, has bent and streched in length. I'm replacing it with something sturdier now.

As yiu read, the same, but much bigger shackle failed on the genoa, but there I think it was an individual failure. These snap shackles have a swivel part connected by a threaded bolt. This kind of screw bolt isn't ment to ever open again and is secured with some glue. In our case it turned open until about three threads where left holding it, and then it ripped out.

I discussed this with Selden, and they promised replacement and at the same time told me that they wanted to replace all 14mm shrouds, since they had several failures of the rolled on eye terminals. At this point I'm waiting for the replacement parts.

Maybe the in-mast furling mainsail is worth mentioning. It has vertical battens and has quite a good shape at almost any point of reefing, if furled with the right backstay tension. It has however kept giving us small trouble with the battens: Vertical battens are very long, the ones closer to the mast are longer than the boat, and hence come in two or three parts which are screwed together. They kept coming apart until we taped the joints with duct tape, and they kept creeping out of their pockets, until we starte dto tie them to velcro strap that closes to pockets, using tie-wraps. All but the smallest batten are carbon, but smallest, whcich is glass splittered slightly on its top and poked a hole through the pocket, then standing out at the top.

In general I feel we are at the low range of trouble to expect from a complex new boat. Over time I have seen a lot of bad things happen on boats, so I start apreciating those many things that seem to work flawlessly.

I have thought about what I would do if I lost the boat for whatever reason and would have to get a new boat again. Two answers came to my mind: Either buy a used 490 and update it to my liking, or go through building a new one from scratch and change the few things we learned. The later would be intriguing becasue it was much fun working with the folks at Najad.



http:// [url]www.taniwani.de [/url]

 

[Guest]

Re: Taniwani Online

HaraldS
Many thanks for your reply. I value both your and snowleopard's suggestion on boat size and will take this on board. Congratulations on your excellent website, very interesting. Sailed the Atlantic to Cadiz in 1990 and found a very good marina near Cadiz, Porto Sherry, prices very reasonable then.
Again many thanks

 

[HaraldS]

Re: Taniwani Online

Adam99
please let us know what boat you'll end up with.
And what are your plans time wise and area wise?

Haven't been in Porto Sherry, but sailed close by. The young crew opted for the real town, and we were not disappointed. Maybe I'll check into Porto Sherry this year when we do some easy sailing between Lagos and Gib, before heading down to the Canaries.

All the best and fair winds. Enjoy the early retirement!

http:// [url]www.taniwani.de [/url]

 

[jonjo]

Re: Taniwani Online

Did you do much research on a safe mounting height for the radar, looks too low to me or maybe the photo was deceptive?

 

[HaraldS]

Re: Taniwani Online

Hi Jonjo,

an interesting point indeed. And yes, I did spend some thought on it.
Don't know what height you guessed form the picture, but the antenna is exactly 2.6m above deck. At the opening angle of 21 degrees (10.5 downwards) this means that my younger son, the biggest of us, would be getting into the beam at about 9m distance (near the mast).

I went through the detailed calculation and the higlights were that at 4kW pulse power, with the highest pusle repetition trate, he average transmitted power was just around 10 Watts. That is spread out around the whole circle, whereas a body in the beam, takes only a fraction of that. With an infinetely narrow beam vertically, those 10 Watts would drop off with the square of the distance, due to the veratical opening angle even more than that.

If I remeber right, I came to about 1/200 of the energy density of a cell phone next to your head.

Now, all that is only relevant if we believe that the only effect of such frequencies is tissue heating.

If we believe, that not the average counts, but the peaks, then off course the effect would be some 400 times higher, but that would also be partially true for a digital cell phone.

Also nobody knows if 10Ghz is a lot worse than 1 GHz.

There are known cases with military radars, that severely effected the operators health, have lead to leucemia and other nasty things. Those where tracked down to an X-ray component that is a by-product of certain types of magnetrons.

I understand that modern comercial radars have no X-ray component. Also that X-ray part is emmitted into all directions as long as there is no shielding metal in its way and not necessarily part of the radar beam.

So I currently believe there is no X-ray danger with a modern boat radar, especially if all covers are in place.

Add to all this that time spent in the radar beam, forward of the mast is very short on our boat. I usully run radar at night or in poor visibility, and then everybody is in the cockpit or below.

My conclusion was that I needn't worry.

<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.taniwani.de>http://www.taniwani.de</A>

 

[jonjo]

Re: radar beam spread

Thanks for the detailed maths, you obviously did research the issue!

I have one doubt, I had previously read somewhere the radiation beam angle was 30 degrees up and down, which if true would puts more of your crew in danger. In support of my theory I have to ask if a 20 degree vertical radar beam spread is useful on a sailing yacht heeled more than 10 degrees?

 

[HaraldS]

Re: radar beam spread

Well, my scanner is listed at 21 degrees vertical beam angle, and I'm quite sure that is up and down together.

The down side is as you say, you get blind sideways if you heel a lot. And that is one thing that is on my list to fix. Planning for a gimbal bracket for that reason.

<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.taniwani.de>http://www.taniwani.de</A>