Hey fellow cruisers - I need some
advice. I've been
renting / time-sharing sailboats for about 10 years (much easier on the wallet! At least for the durations I've been doing), but it's getting time to buy a
boat for some longer duration voyages.
Since my long-term plans may include
offshore /
South Pacific sailing, I've been researching all the "bluewater
boat lists", reading
forums like these, etc.
What I'm still confused on is: are there used bluewater-capable boats in the 32-38' range that aren't old designs (built more than 20 years ago)? Did they not build any such boats in the 90s and 2000's? Or are the owners just not ready to sell them yet? Or perhaps some modern production boats actually are
bluewater capable, but traditionalists say they're not because they're holding on to romantic notions of what boats used to be like?
All the ones I find on the market in
Seattle and online tend to be 1980's-ish boats. While many are very respectable, well made boats, they also use a lot of
wood (teak decks and interiors) and usually have more cramped, awkward interiors. Even the few
bluewater boats I've found built in the early 90's (a 1992
Pacific Seacraft 34) were still using the same designs and style from the 1970s-80s.
Of the boats I've sailed - J/35Cs,
C&C 27s, J/105s, J/80s, J/24s,
Catalina 320,
C&C 30,
Jeanneau 38,
Jeanneau 36, Rhodes 19 - the J/35c impressed us the most, and is therefore my reference point for comparing used boats to - but, most people would say it's not a bluewater capable boat.
The short-term plan is probably a 2-3 month
cruise around
Vancouver Island and San Juans, but the medium-term plan might be a 1-year trip to
Mexico and
Hawaii. And in the long-term, I'm hoping the
South Pacific and other extended bluewater cruising may come into the picture.
So in the short-term a production cruiser like a J/35c would be fine - but it seems like it would be better to get a boat that I can grow into for the long-term aspirations, since I expect to put a fair amount of time and
money into fitting out whatever boat I buy. It'd be rough to perfect one boat only to have to sell and it do that all over again in 2 years.