Welcome to the forum. We have people of all backgrounds and sailing levels. They all meet here and we all help each other.
Guess what the most often asked question is here from
new sailors? That would be yours. I'm sorry to say there is no easy answer to your question. The correct
boat is like
buying a new suit. It has to fit the person (and crew) as well as the occasion. It would be nice if they made only one type and then you would just buy one. It would be nice if we could make a list of all the bad boats so you don't buy one but we can't. It's also about the
money. Can you afford 1 million dollars? If not then your choices are limited but not to the point of nothing. You do need to come to terms with finances for the
boat,
gear, supplies and expenses. So until you get into all of that you still don't know how much you can afford. Picking the boat is best done with more
learning behind you and even a little bit of sailing experience.
If you are finding there is sooo much information then you are probably on the right track. There is even more than you might imagine. I should expect you will still be finding more questions in 6 months to a year. You take things at your own pace and just relax and keep going. Answers raise more questions and more questions require more questions to get back to the original question. You start to learn all the things you don't know faster than you can learn the first things. It just takes a while to catch up.
Major suggestion! Start working the whole
family as in everyone that might be on this boat you don't have yet. You can do all this alone and tend to them too.
You'll need a crew for this adventure and they all need to learn a lot too. They all need to learn to
work together and live in a small space together. If you have ever done a trip in an RV it's like that but with less space. You need to do it in a way that makes it all fun because no matter what it is all supposed to be fun even if you have to work hard from time to time. If you though
learning to drive a car was hard this is 100 times harder.
You probably can't go wrong getting a bit more experience. If the trip is in three years you would do best to take a year and study and maybe take some lessons and work up to being able to do a
charter. A one week
charter shakes out a lot of issues and it only takes a week and the
money spent might be the cheapest trip you'll ever do. It gives the whole group a chance to see what it's like and build the excitement a little bit so they will be more willing to learn and study more. I would put off
buying a boat for at least another year, but you need to own the boat probably a full season to get to know it and become proficient at operating it. Short trips with the group gets everyone in shape.
GPS systems work the same no matter where you are. Street driving instructions don't apply to
boating yet chart plotter systems build in
charts with GPS..
Navigation is just a whole
concept you also need to learn a whole lot about in addition to every piece of
equipment on the boat and even more topics.
There is probably a topic in every
single section of this forum that applies to something you need to know. Begin your planning and perhaps even start with some written materials. You need to develop a second set of organization that can deal with all this new information you are going to encounter.