Over The Sea. The Outro.

Reflecting on the journey, on sailing, and on the ideal boat.

When we were thinking about sailing a few years ago we wondered if we had learned to do something we did not hugely enjoy. But this has been a fine Epic Journey. Do we want to do more sailing, or have a boat again?

Thinking about the boat, the SunOdyssey 35 was easy to learn for marina manoeuvring with steerage way at almost no speed. It tacked through 90′, had speed at 40 degrees off the wind and was OK downwind to 160 degrees. Alba presented it with excellent equipment and truly ready to go anywhere.

The single line reefing won no friends despite allegedly not requiring a visit to the mast. See Doris’s note on reefing.

The Webasto diesel heating worked better than we expected so we were not cold on moorings. We liked the large engine though having the stop and start controls on the floor is not very helpful. The sailing controls are a long way from the helm. You have to lock off the wheel and shimmy round the central wheel pillar in order to go forward to the clutches and adjust sail. A traveller in front of the wheel would bring two main controls nearer to hand.  Leading 10 clutches into 2 winches also led to a lot of rope juggling.  We liked having the mainsheet traveller but again it went through the same clutch/winch bank.

Should we have another boat? And if so, what? During the sea passages we started a set of criteria.

Certainly sitting below in harbour with no view is no good so we would like a deck saloon. With a big engine. (We tried out a Broadblue 346 catamaran with its deck saloon on our Portuguese Skipper’s Refresher course and decided that the sailing compromises and climbing up and down to the berths in the hulls were not for us.) Perhaps with a self tacker and a big sail for downwind without the complexity of a spinnaker, and ideally with a mainsheet traveller. Down below, the doors will be tall enough not to scalp Sid and/or be foam protected. The owners’ enclosure will have a square bed with headroom, and a bathroom with a separate shower compartment. There will be autopilot controls indoors for bad weather driving. The galley will have a grill or large domestic batteries plus inverter for a toaster.  There will be a rib-style dinghy mounted on davits. All of this is leading us towards a cutter-rigged boat that is over 40′ long.

To buy and maintain such a boat would be expensive but the boats we have found for hire do not match the spec. We are probably not so fixated on sailing to buy one, which in any case will not be where we want to sail. Perhaps hiring a slightly larger boat where we want to sail would answer some of the requirements. Alba have a larger boat, a Dufour 425 called Pollyanna which might be very interesting to try out.

West Scotland is a great sailing area and with our new found confidence we could go further, to the northern Hebrides and maybe even St Kilda. Alba tell us that some charterers have gone to Orkney, through the Caledonian Canal, or to Northern Ireland. The listings in “Welcome Anchorages” have been over optimistic but an electric motor and a better pig (perhaps davit-mounted) would give us better access to shore-based facilities. More practise at anchoring so that we could spend nights confidently at anchor would give us loads more choices of places to stop.

From a personal point of view, we were pleased that so much of our sailing knowledge came back, and we feel vastly more competent as sailors than we did just two weeks ago.  Some of the weather felt a bit brave, but we always knew how to handle it.  The weather and sea state allowed us to gently build our motion tolerance though we don’t know how long that will last. Sid thinks we quite like sailing and might well do more.

So we are refitted and ready to help sail friends’ boats and to hire in other places. We are probably not going to be live aboard long term cruisers, not for the next few years anyway.  But that doesn’t stop Doris from looking at the adverts.