Your ideal 36-40ft Transat/Circumnav Boat..

I have just made an offer on a Moody 42 Ketch, and I hope to get her ready for the Atlantic next year. She looks pretty good for the job to me. Hopefully the survey doesn't throw up any unexpected items.
 
What appears attractive in the UK can be quite different in a hot climate. I have always fancied a pilothouse yacht for the UK. These don't work so well in Caribbean when its hot and sunny all the time. You end up covering the large windows to keep the temperature under control below. Great for growing tomatoes. What may appear an ocean going roughty tuffty yacht like a Bowman may make a good yacht in a hot climate where the smaller glazing area keep temperatures under control. In the Caribbean we spend all of our time in the cockpit. The design of the cockpit is more important when you are at anchor than pilothouse windows that you have had to cover up.
 
geem said:
What appears attractive in the UK can be quite different in a hot climate. I have always fancied a pilothouse yacht for the UK. These don't work so well in Caribbean when its hot and sunny all the time. You end up covering the large windows to keep the temperature under control below. Great for growing tomatoes. What may appear an ocean going roughty tuffty yacht like a Bowman may make a good yacht in a hot climate where the smaller glazing area keep temperatures under control. In the Caribbean we spend all of our time in the cockpit. The design of the cockpit is more important when you are at anchor than pilothouse windows that you have had to cover up.
Click to expand...

Granted, but many of the covers, while they look opaque from outside, actually reflect most of the heat/light but still give a good view out. They are more like sunglasses than blindfolds.

MD
 
mobeydick said:
Granted, but many of the covers, while they look opaque from outside, actually reflect most of the heat/light but still give a good view out. They are more like sunglasses than blindfolds.

MD
Click to expand...
We have them on our sprayhood windows for the same reason. We often have the centre window zipped out and the two side mesh shades installed to keep the sun off the cockpit. Some of our friends have opted for white canvass instead of mesh so no view out
 
Sorry, just catching up on this thread after being away for the last few days. Thanks for all the great input. My budget is not really defined yet but I'd say it will be somewhere between £40k-£60k.
I am just starting the research process at the moment and it will be a few years before I make a move. My circumstances may change in the next few years so I would like to have a plan developed so that I could go cruising within 4 to 6 months. Ideally I would like to do an Atlantic circuit but the Pacific really interests me too. I've followed a few very interesting video logs and blogs recently and gained a lot of info.
Cockpit size is a big one for me. I've raced a lot on everything from sportsboats to 50 footers and the limited bit of cruising i have done has been on modern boats like Beneteau's and the like. A lot of older boats seem to have very small aft cockpits, mainly due to the pinched stern designs of the 70's and 80's. As most cruising will be done in warmer climates I think a big outdoor area would be essential. I have seen a few centre cockpit boats that work well with a bit of modification. I saw on boat with a custom built seat across the aft rail and dodgers to act as a windblock. It made for a nice comfortable aft deck area.
Also, if anyone has any good links to blogs about preparing a boat to go bluewater cruising I would be very interested.
Thanks!
 
theoldsalt said:
In my opinion even £60k is nowhere near enough for what you have in mind.
Click to expand...

Why not?

The British (Northshore) built Vancouver 36 has an enormous cockpit and one sold recently in the Bristol Channel and was asking £50000. Don't know the selling price but that's £10000 + to get the boat ready.

Here's a blog on a sistership:

http://www.nenupharv36.co.uk/

All the coachroof side windows are opening lewmars and you can always add additional coachtop hatches if required.

Don't confuse these with the Taiwanese built ones which are a completely different design
 
Last edited:
E39mad said:
Why not?
Click to expand...

You might manage with £60k for a 36' boat but the price jumps up considerable with larger. For a good 40' boat you may need up to double. Good boats are hard to find. Cheap boats may not be up to the task. They may be old and in need considerable upgrades and replacements to make them suitable for ocean sailing. Rather like with cars people tend to sell when lots of money is needed to be spent. However if the cash is readily available and you are in no hurry you may be lucky if in the right place at the right time.
Good luck.
 
theoldsalt said:
You might manage with £60k for a 36' boat but the price jumps up considerable with larger. For a good 40' boat you may need up to double. Good boats are hard to find. Cheap boats may not be up to the task. They may be old and in need considerable upgrades and replacements to make them suitable for ocean sailing. Rather like with cars people tend to sell when lots of money is needed to be spent. However if the cash is readily available and you are in no hurry you may be lucky if in the right place at the right time.
Good luck.
Click to expand...

Agree. With that kind of budget the base boat would be in the £40k range and be over 30 years old. Once you have looked at 35'+ boats in that price range you will see why they need as much again spent on them to bring them up to standard. These are boats that would be in the £1/4m+ price bracket new now so bits for replacement and upgrading have costs related to that sort of level, so £20k does not go far, particularly if it does not have the long distance, warm waters gear already. much of course depends on how much work the individual can do themselves and the level of comfort expected, and of course many people do cruise on small boats with small budgets.


For the OP, there is plenty of material on preparing boats for long term cruising. A scan down the pages of the Liveaboard forum and Noonsite will throw up references to blogs, books, magazine articles etc. Once you get into it there is no shortage of information out there, even if it is scary and at times contradictory. Just make sure you choose your anchor early and that will cut out much of your searching!
 
The most important factor is NOT the size of the boat but your ability to maintain the vessel and its systems yourselves. If you cant change your own cutless bearing, service and maintain your engine, use a rivetter, climb a mast, then you will spend a huge amount of money getting other people to do it. Maintaining a bigger boat is not an issue if you have these practical skills, its just a question of scale and time.
 
For me, 36ft is not big enough for living onboard full time and if crossing oceans I would want a larger yacht. It doesn't come down to one issue but a number of issues. The ability to carry stores, water, fuel, additional crew if you want and maintain a good sailing performance and do it all in reasonable comfort are the main issues for me. In addition, when you are spending time living on anchor a decent dinghy becomes more of a priority with a larger engine so you can cover some distance to get to town for supplies etc. To do this you need a reasonable size yacht. it can be done on smaller boats but most things are compromised. The average size yacht cruising the Caribbean is 45ft (or it was several years ago. I suspect it is now longer). This means that some do cruise on smaller yachts but most don't.
 
Something for every budget here! http://www.jryachts.com/yachts-for-sale

Having crossed the Atlantic in a 36ft (Westerly Corsair) and lived aboard as a couple in the tropics, when the kids came along we went to 38ft (Moody cc) then as the kids grew up we thought we would go to 42-45ft.

Interestingly we have gone back to 36ft. (Contest)

She has wide uncluttered decks, bags of stowage and is easy to handle.

In warm climates most of the time you are outside.


....however if money were no object would probably choose a Rassy 43
 
Last edited:
Well i have done quite a few transats and rtw on a cat, tho now have 57 ft mono and in the Canaries again to meet up with Barry The Gangster who has also done umpteen Atlantic crossings, usually twice a year on his 47ft cat. I am ok with a cat, but also ok with mono. Likewise I think mobo's are good fun too, and exactly the right thing to come and rescue the saily boats. I sometimes wonder if extremely anti-mobo saily types should be rescued ONLY with rescuing saily boats, hah! But that's off the point....

I think your ideal long-distancey boat will have the following

Bigness! The bigger the better. So as far as your budget allows, I recommend you go for a boat which has bigness above everything else. Don't worry about "handling" it - the bigger the boat the easier it is to handle - a boat's displacement (linertia, like) increases with the cube of it's LOA, whereas the windage (gets blown around) increases only in proportion with the square of LOA. And also with those cubes, expect a 50-footer to have FIVE times the internal space of a 30 footer, a 40 footer about half that of a 50 footer. In any weather, bigness means that you can have a laugh handsteering the thing downwind in 40 knots like we did on the way here from Gib. In a 35 footer it's a bit more full-on, wetter, iffy, lifejacket stuff. In 50ft catamaran of course you can serve dinner on the cockpit table in up to 30 knots downwind or more, play Jenga in 2m Atlantic sea in up to 20knots but more of that later.

It will have a Yanmar engine. Or two if it's a cat. Solid motors PLUS worldwide parts and service availability, these seem to have the best/easiest parts/service/spares availability. Like ferinstance I needed engine mounts in Tahiti, and they were off the shelf. Likewise it will have Raymarine nav gear. Yeah, there's loads better, but it's a spares and service thing, again. Carry at least a spare head unit and GPS mushroom for when (not if) one of these fail. For the same reasons, it will have Jabsco toilets.

It will have in-mast furling, if possible, and for several reasons. You can "try a bit of main" frequently on a long and short passages, so you'll sail more instead of motoring. You won't have to mess about for half an hour of more getting the main in and out (i.e. up and down) . It's easy short handed and your long trip is ALWAYS short handed. And it's miles better in terms of UV protection for the mainsail. And it looks smarter without that string-bound cluttering lunk hanging off the boom.

It will have loads of fuel capacity. The more diesel you can carry, the more options you have in both nice and nasty conditions. Nice -like staying off the grid for weeks on end. Nasty - for dodging nasty weather and arg -expensive or non-available fuel. For example. if they're waiting for a ship to arrive, the fuel guys in the (French Poly) Marquesas will let you have the same amount of fuel as locals demand- about 50 litres a week.

It will be an AWB - so you can sell the thing when you're through with the adventure.

It *might* be a catamaran. But maybe not. Forget the safety things - cats are safe as heck. EVERY capsize would be in the yotmags and so far they have a lightweight arg-expensive ( $$$forget it) Gunboat which flipped at over 20+knots. Wooh. Crusining cats are under-rigged so befoe you flip it the mast will break, which also hardly ever happens. You have to reef to the numbers at 20, 25 and 30 knots AWS. Cats have massive "roll moment of inertia" cos they are either on one keel or the other - and each time the other keel gives the stability. Cats also don't have big lumps of keel to drag about which kill if they fall off or cost fuel if they don't.

More on the plus side, cat's are flatter on an ocean so you can cook and eat on a table instead of out of your hands, and you can sleep without lee cloths, you get two engines with nice redundancy and ace motoring range on one motor, plus easier to carry a bigger dinghy for given length than a mono.

BUT ...catamarans might also be described as the Ugly Wife option - you'l need to be ok about "shopping trolley" jibes and you get poor "yeah, that's my boat" feel-good quotient. It's no fun to sail a catamaran, think RV instead of sports-car or actually motorbikey mono. Cat's are more un-nerving in big sea (e.g. less feedback about being overcanvassedy) and they make a lot of crash-bang noise at sea - high speeds on a mono are serene, on a cat down below it sounds as though you've just hit something- about every 30 seconds.

Cat's are likely faster downwind, if you get decent sails. A Parasailor will give around 1/3 TWS downwind. very fab Actually a sym spi will give half TWS but is more flaky and likely to blow out, but cost 2k instead of 10k, eek.

Oh and for long-distance sailing, you wait for the right weather - that means downwind. I don't know any liveaboard who hangs around in the bar saying " Oh yes, we're waiting for the wind to turn against us cos our boat points upwind really well you know". Long-distance sailing is about sailing the right way at the right time of year. And it's about fooling about or er sightseeing etc with the boat at anchor. It's not about getting back on Sunday, ever. So almost no upwind, thanks.

Tme wise, sailing an Atlantic circuit is around 2-3 months max of solid sailing the rest of the time at anchor or (if Arc-type) in a marina. Carib and french Poly, think anchoring. Back at Azores and Med and UK and S Africa - marinas again. Leaving the boat? More marinas. Cats win on the anchoring, monos win in marinas.

All imho.
 
Last edited:
E39mad said:
Why not?

The British (Northshore) built Vancouver 36 has an enormous cockpit and one sold recently in the Bristol Channel and was asking £50000. Don't know the selling price but that's £10000 + to get the boat ready.

Here's a blog on a sistership:

http://www.nenupharv36.co.uk/

All the coachroof side windows are opening lewmars and you can always add additional coachtop hatches if required.

Don't confuse these with the Taiwanese built ones which are a completely different design
Click to expand...

I have a Vancouver 36 and it would be ideal as others have described.

If I were to sell it (fully kitted out and in very good condition ready for a long trip), it would be for a lot more than £50k
 
A few options here. I suspect a decent ocean-going cat will be out of budget. I'd like to propose a Trident Warrior 40. Well built, set up for ocean work and getting close to the OP's budget.
 
geem said:
For me, 36ft is not big enough for living onboard full time and if crossing oceans I would want a larger yacht. It doesn't come down to one issue but a number of issues. The ability to carry stores, water, fuel, additional crew if you want and maintain a good sailing performance and do it all in reasonable comfort are the main issues for me. In addition, when you are spending time living on anchor a decent dinghy becomes more of a priority with a larger engine so you can cover some distance to get to town for supplies etc. To do this you need a reasonable size yacht. it can be done on smaller boats but most things are compromised. The average size yacht cruising the Caribbean is 45ft (or it was several years ago. I suspect it is now longer). This means that some do cruise on smaller yachts but most don't.
Click to expand...


See post #24.

If a pro delivery skipper has this view of a sub 40 foot boat it needs to be taken on board.

Our Island Packet 350 is 36 feet ten inches O/A length and crossed the Atlantic with the previous owner.

We live aboard 4/5 months each summer and find it perfect now we have it sorted.

For a small crew-husband and wife-it is perfect.

I recently found out that the shrewd Bob Johnson-company founder and designer of Island Packets realised pretty soon that many potential customers would not use the undoubted good seakeeping qualities of his boats but would be less adventurous.

With this in mind he ensured that all IP's are shallow enought in draught and mast height is low enough for them to pass under the bridges and power cables over the Inter Coastal Waterway in America.

With a design compromise like that the performance of IP's comes up even higher in my estimation.

By making this compromise he added about 50% to IP's market share-the Inter Coastal is safe boating and many owners never leave it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top