Irwin 65 / 68 for world cruising

[Stumble]

No real experience with the 68' we looked at one seriously before settling on the 54'. I spent 10 years on and off growing up on the boat, and cut my teeth helping to maintain her.

The major issue with the Irwin construction we found was a lot of small things were sourced from RV parts not marine. So things like light switches and door handles weren't as reliable as we would have liked, and it was almost impossible to source matching parts. On the upside is that this long past construction most of those things will have either been replaced or will probably last forever.

On the ships systems stuff Irwin did use high quality marine parts. The only real issue we ever had was when we got hit by lightning some of the parts were very hard to source because they went for very high end suppliers instead of standard ones.