Be careful that you don't "fall between chairs".
Buying a $30K
boat, when your cash availability is 50, will leave you with too little of a "precautionary (cash) balance". Stick to 30 feet (that is the "sweet spot” for people who are not rich), buy for 10K, and you'll make it.
Clearly,
buying a structurally sound
hull and rig, of sound design, is the alpha and omega of buying old, used,
cheap boats. What is IN the
hull and ON the hull (and spars) is of secondary importance, since deficiencies in those items are something you can do something about yourself. For
cheap. If not now, then when you have learned to do it. And you WILL learn :-)
Given that I'm a pre-WWII model, I don't climb masts with the alacrity I used to, my reaction time is not what it once was, and neither is my balance. So I chose to buy for 10 (17 when all was said and done) and re-engine for 15. Now TrentePieds will live to be a hundred, and I can look forward to accompanying her a fair bit along the way, cos I'll have complete
reliability, mechanically.
"Sound hull and rig" depends, in part, on where you intend to use the
boat. Your statement of possible destinations is all over the map. "Horses for courses" applies also to boats.
Norway is NOT Otahiti, and Otahiti is NOT the
Mediterranean. And
Norway is NOT the coast of
British Columbia or
Alaska, although they look the same at first glance. The reason that they are not the same, is that the
weather regimes are not the same.
Be aware that you cannot buy a
used boat and drive it off the dealer's lot like you would a Toyota. A realistic time-frame for a
novice to buy a thirty-footer, fit her out and trial her for
blue water use would be, say, five years. That means in reality that you'll be doing coastwise cruising for that time, which is just as well if you are a
novice, for you will need that time, if you are a novice now, to learn to be a
skipper.
You can certainly feed yourself for $650/mnth, though you cannot feed yourself AND the boat within that limit. Just hauling and bottom painting, which you should be doing each year, will cost you $650, possibly $800. Your sacrificial zinks, another $100, and on and on. And on. When you lay your cruising
budget be aware that there are members of this forum that I judge, reading between the lines, can spend fifty dollars, or ever five hundred, as casually as you and I would spend five. Being clear-eyed about that obviously becomes important when you cogitate on what recommendation to accept and which ones you should reject.
In brief: You don't need “ModCons”. They are nice to have, but you don't NEED them . My
depth sounder is an oldfashioned lead-line. Five bux worth of sinker from the
fishing gear and 10 fathoms of cod line. I have a $3K
Garmin “chart plotter”, but only because it came with the boat. I don't NEED it, and I seldom use it. My retro-fit
GPS from the car comes with me and gives me the co-ordinates anywhere I'll be going, and every fifteen minutes I plot my position on a paper chart. Why do I do that? Because being on
passage at 5 knots is, for me, so excruciatingly boring, that I just HAVE to fnd something to do :-)
So concentrate on finding a sound HULL and STANDING RIG suitable for, and located in, the waters you want to ply.
Best of luck – on second thought: Don't rely on luck! :-)
TrentePieds