We've owned our Endeavour 37 A-Plan for about 2 years. We haven't cruised her yet, but are preparing her for a 3 year
cruise. But I can offer the following input. Re: the A , B, or rare C plan boats. The A plan worked for my wife and I mainly because we plan to cruise with just us two. We'll leave the forward dinette down, and leave it as a huge queen size bunk. The private aft master
cabin will be reserved for visiting friends. We chose this option, because my wife hates the limited
head room V-berths and the aft stateroom provide. By the way, we cruised an old
Columbia 33 (v-berth)for about 15,000 miles, including a Hawaii round trip, so we have some v-berth experience. We've also added a cockpit filler, to make the cockpit a
bed, and enclosed the dodger/
bimini with screens for outside tropic sleeping.
Regarding the Endeavour 37 construction. The boat is generally well constructed, but there are some issues that should be addressed.
1. There were almost 500 of these boats built, but on most of the early ones ,mine is No. 256, the water that drains down the
mast (main sail track)
leaks into the
bilge. Unfortunately due to a design/construction flaw, this water was trapped between the subfloor and
bilge, and resulted in a rotted out below
deck bulkhead aft of the mast. This can be repaired, but it's a labor intensive difficult job. I just completed mine.
2. The hulls are well constructed, with substantial
fiberglass laminate in the
hull, and (in my boats case (( built in 1979)) little blistering of the below waterline jell coat. There are adequate SS fasteners on the hull/deck bond.
3. There are a lot of unfortunate
cheap construction shortcuts that effect both the
maintenance and appearance of the boat. They used a lot of regular
steel nails to temporarily nail floor timbers in place before fiber-glassing, and used
steel nails in the corners of all of the
teak parquet
flooring. This results in the obvious rusty nails below the sub floor, and lots of rusty black nail spots in the beautiful
teak floor. Also the
interior while very attractive with lots of well built solid teak and mahogany cabinets and
panels, suffers from poorly assembled
panels and liners. There are lots of steel staples in the
headliner and side panels.Worst of all is the
head liner that is sandwiched between the bulkheads and cabin top. It can't be removed without tearing the entire thing out. These are most likely common construction methods on boats in this price range. And at 35 years old all the little steel
parts are starting to rust up.
4. Regarding it's sailing ability, the basic boat is apparently a streached Creekmore 34. This seems to have resulted in the
sloop version suffering from moderate
weather helm. Some models were fitted with a bow sprit, that extended the forestay several feet. This takes care of the
weather helm problem. Our boat doesn't have this and we compensate for it when sailing. It's something we can live with.
5. The standard rig, is rather small, although very well built. But the stock rig doesn't carry much sail. So she
sails very well in heavy air. Over 20 knots, but needs light air jibs to move with the rest of the plastic boats when the winds are lighter.
The A and C plans do open up the interior and the boats seem larger than 37 feet, mainly because they don't have the main bulkhead forward of the dinette and aft of the v-berth. The A plan's partial internal bulkheads and glassed-in cabinetry seem to add the necessary rigidity to compensate for not having this bulkhead, there don't seem to be any reports of
oil canning or flexing of the
hull.
Our boat is in the San Francisco Bay Area, and you're welcome to come see it if you are in the area.
I'd also recommend looking at the Endeavour Owner's Forum. You can Google it. There's lots of owners comments about the E-37 there. Good luck, Paul