We have been talking to our good friend Joe about possibly buying a boat. And his most important piece of guidance is: “First, understand what you want your boat to do”.
Like so many things in life, choosing a boat requires some sort of compromise. Racing machines are fast but uncomfortable. Tubby little cruisers can be very luxurious but you pay for it by sacrificing speed and the ability to go upwind quickly.
Big boats have lots of space inside, they can carry all the comforts of home, and they will handle big waves well but are heavy and expensive to buy and run. Little boats (like Bunty and Seahorse on this trip) are achingly cute and light to handle but have very little space internally and could feel like going to sea in a Scout tent pitched on top of a shower tray.
Sailing boats are gloriously silent once you have the sails up, but so often the wind is in the wrong direction and you end up with the engine on anyway. They can also have keels which go down a long way under the water, which limits where you can go in those lovely little anchorages. Motor boats have bigger engines and hull shapes that allow them to go much faster in any direction you want, and they are shallower, but if you run out of fuel then that’s it, you aren’t going anywhere at all. Also you can’t creep up on the wildlife, and you have to take out a mortgage every time you want to fill the fuel tank (Flyer has used only half a tank of diesel in nearly two weeks).
But one thing this trip round the chilly but beautiful Western Isles has told us is: we really want to be able to see out from our sofa/dinner table. On normal yachts, like Flyer, there is an open cockpit where you can look at the view and slowly freeze to death, but as soon as you go indoors you also go downstairs into a wooden box. A comfortable, cozy, heated wooden box, but with about the same amount of view as a WWII pillbox.
Just one-eighth of the view from the cockpit.
What you can see when you are standing up inside.
The entire view from Sid’s blogstation.
Motor boats have loads of room upstairs, and because they are essentially square in cross-section rather than triangular like a sailboat, they also have larger cabins below and less opportunity for Sid to strike his head on doorways.
We tried a catamaran when we did a Skipper Refresher course on the Broadblue 364(?) last October – a catamaran has a big square living space connecting the two hulls, loadsa space, plenty of views, and then you climb down into the hulls to reach the bedrooms/bathrooms etc. But in a two-man catamaran the hulls are necessarily narrow and the bedroom is very cramped – larger cats are just too big for us to handle.
The compromise vessel is a deck saloon or pilot house yacht. Research is underway.
PS Sid says that he also wants one with a Square Bed so you can get out of bed at the side, rather than crawling out over the pillows.
