Moody 37/376 buying advice and alternatives?

Tranona said:
...This is less of an issue for a couple who are going sailing to get to places and the place is a stop on the way as opposed to spending most time at anchor with short passages to change anchorages. a good example to illustrate this is in the article on bluewater boats in this month's PBO where several of the people featured were doing long passages of several thousand miles between stops and going to the more out of the way places. Therefore they advocated boats like Nicholson 38, Rival 38 etc which are much more suited to that type of use, but not so attractive for the more laid back lifestyle of the typical Med cruiser.
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I think this highlights where we are coming at things from a different angle.
At the risk of sounding like a deluded naive fool, we don't actually want to spend all our time on an endless holiday in the med. We want to travel, explore, and have a bit of an adventure. If we could afford the right boat, we would be going north rather than south- at least for the first couple of years. We want to cross oceans and go to out of the way places. Frankly, if we only get to the Med it will be because things didn't work out as we had hoped.

We've met some very inspirational people over the years, e.g. the young couple who built their own boat from ply-epoxy and then completed an Atlantic circuit on it, or the singlehander circumnavigating on an engineless 28ft boat with no electronics.

I acknowledge that we might never achieve what some of our friends have done, but we want to at least try. We will likely end up being restricted by the limits of sailing with a young child, our own skills and stamina, and the abilities of whatever boat we end up with. I know that for every hundred dreamers, only a handful of people actually live that dream- but you've got to start somewhere :)
 
{ It is all a matter of size as I have pointed out earlier. Vic has a 44 for 2 people, and when you get that size a lot of the issues of space go away, particularly on deck although there was a tendency in the past to then pack as much in as you could in terms of cabins and gear. My gripe with the boats in the 36/8' size with CC is they are too cramped and what is there is not what is needed for your type of use (as you have described it) nor mine.}



actually It's a 42 Tarnona and there three you forgotten the ship cat :) ,
No but really Moody's do make a big boat quite a lot of years back I had a Moody 36 CC and although at the time we wasn't liveaboard we did use the boat for long periods, every school holidays we was off, two adult two children, and room was never a problem, we sailed all over Northern Europe in that boat, six weeks at a time in the summer.
for us who have sailed with children know very well they need lots more room.
Could we live as we do in a 36cc Moody?, yes I sure we could without any problem,
There was more room in it then our 38.5 and we managed ok in that for 7 years.
Went we was looking at selling our Dufour our aim was to go no bigger then a 40 cc , I wanted to go back to Moody's as I own different Moody models over a 27 years period ,
it just happen our boat we have now, 42cc came up at a price we couldn't turn down although it was in need of an almost complete refit,
We do miss having a walk through cockpit just stepping off the back when mooring stern too, and the convention of seeing how Close I am from any object from the wheel position, but it just a matter of team work, we just now drop the anchor X amount of scope then my partner return to the stern while I continue to work the anchor from the cockpit. Stepping off isn't any different, you can still stand on the sugar scoop to step off, if any thing at time it comes in handy being higher.

Where difficulty can arise is when you moor side on, you first have to step on to the seating then out of the cockpit and then it quite a way down to the pontoon, this takes a lot more time, So if your solo sailing or you crew isn't fit enough it can at time be a problem, although on my old 36cc I did also do a lot of solo sailing and in them days it was all Marina and I managed but I was a lot younger then.
Again swimming off the back isn't a problem, we have a the sugar scoop to step off or sit on.
One thing we love about the CC is the big area we have to sit about on the stern,
I think when it come to the type of boat for one self use, you need to work out what you going to use it for, your own and crew fitness, and what size is big enough to make life comfortable but not too big for you to handle or maintain, for some it's a CC others it's an AC boat.
One think we have to remember is there a big different between a full time liveaboard and season sailors who are out for say four months at a time, liveaboard need more room to carry all there worldly goods where season sailors turn up with a couple of bags.
What ever boat people chooses, enjoy and hopeful the dream will became a reality.
 
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Kelpie said:
I think this highlights where we are coming at things from a different angle.
At the risk of sounding like a deluded naive fool, we don't actually want to spend all our time on an endless holiday in the med. We want to travel, explore, and have a bit of an adventure. If we could afford the right boat, we would be going north rather than south- at least for the first couple of years. We want to cross oceans and go to out of the way places. Frankly, if we only get to the Med it will be because things didn't work out as we had hoped.
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Good for you Kelpie, so many people ideas of liveaboard is getting some where like the Med ( Greece )and then spend the rest of their cruising day there , now that not to say there any thing wrong with that but then you may just a well rent/ buy a house there ,
I have the view of liveaboard is all about exploring new country's and meeting new people, seeing how out people live and experience their way of live.
i wish your dreams the best of luck .
 
Kelpie said:
yes, interesting. Obviously quite old but could be bulletproof. Lack of a walk through could be the deal breaker, but an en suite could help things a bit.
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They are built like the proverbial outhouse, and with the ketch rig and covered cockpit, they make an excellent blue water explorer
 
In a totally different vein, any thoughts on the Beneteau 36cc? One coming on the market locally, apparently. Can't say I'm blown away, judging by initial impressions gained from a quick bit of Googling...
 
Kelpie said:
In a totally different vein, any thoughts on the Beneteau 36cc? One coming on the market locally, apparently. Can't say I'm blown away, judging by initial impressions gained from a quick bit of Googling...
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Wouldn't be my choice. Not a patch on a Moody 37
 
Kelpie said:
In a totally different vein, any thoughts on the Beneteau 36cc? One coming on the market locally, apparently. Can't say I'm blown away, judging by initial impressions gained from a quick bit of Googling...
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After a couple of decades of UK sailing I really liked it when it came out and looked forward to the secondhand ones becoming affordable. Went on board one in Brighton and was still very tempted, even if I did wonder a bit how the very secure but high cockpit would feel when heeled.

But as you can see from my previous posts, my warm weather Med, Caribbean and cross Atlantic sailing moved me firmly to the big aft cockpit camp.
 
Kelpie said:
In a totally different vein, any thoughts on the Beneteau 36cc? One coming on the market locally, apparently. Can't say I'm blown away, judging by initial impressions gained from a quick bit of Googling...
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Having looked at both, the Bavaria 38/40 Ocean is superior in every way, unless you're insisting on a shaft drive perhaps. Of course I'm biased, as I ended up buying a 40 Ocean (which I've gotten to know intimately, living aboard during refit and now cruising). Only the Bimini design is annoying (we have to unshackle the mainsheet to open/close the thing). That's more of a problem with the way this particular Bimini was constructed than the boat though.

The Moodys are fine boats on the spreadsheet (I particularly liked the layout of the 425), but having looked at some of them, they all had that undefinable feeling (and smell) of "old" to them. Perhaps I only happened across poorly kept ones though.

Others on my own (then) shortlist were:
* Trintella 38 (age? hard to find anyways)
* Westerly Oceanlord (hobbit door to aft cabin on older models, and as a owner told me, really idiotic carpentry)
* Southerly 115 (great layout, swing keel is fantastic, but only the Mk1 was affordable and that had a fatally shallow rudder design)
 
Bavaria Oceans ar very solid and well-loved by their owners. Trouble is, because of this they don't tend to come up for sale very often, and when they do they fetch a good price and sell quickly.
 
I suspect not many Oceans were built though which partly accounts for this as everyone was looking for aft cockpit 37s at a lower price for the charter market !
I do recall looking around one although well out of our budget at the time but at 40 foot they didn't seem to suffer from some of the aspects identified earlier in the 376 or indeed the later Moody 36 as to visual appeal .
 
ashtead said:
I suspect not many Oceans were built though which partly accounts for this as everyone was looking for aft cockpit 37s at a lower price for the charter market !
I do recall looking around one although well out of our budget at the time but at 40 foot they didn't seem to suffer from some of the aspects identified earlier in the 376 or indeed the later Moody 36 as to visual appeal .
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A surprisingly large number were sold considering the short time (3 seasons) of production, but were well dispersed and relatively few sold in the UK, perhaps because they were not cheap, being priced alongside the Moodys of the time. You can see why Bavaria dropped them as the charter market really took off in 1999/2000. The operator I bought my 37 through in 2001 took delivery of 67 Bavarias in just the one year.
 
Latest PBO has a good article by Peter Poland, I thought I had read up all there was to read on Moodies by now, but still learned a few things. Impressed by what people have done in the 376 and similar- circumnavs and high latitude stuff. Definitely given me more confidence that this is the right sort of boat. Just have to wait a couple of years for things to fall into place... and in the meantime if anybody is thinking of selling theirs...
 
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