Well, perhaps most people. There are the odd folks (like myself) who love, rather than endure long passages.
My longest was Midway to Los Angeles (35 days, double handed) which was immediately preceded by Kwajalein to Midway (14 days) with a one week stop for crew change,
fuel,
water, etc.
I seem to end up in “out of season” passages (left Kwajalein on September 12 and arrived LA November 9th. 3days in a feeder storm for a typhoon, all but two days with the
wind forward of the beam.
The
boat, a carefully rebuilt Cruising
CAL 35 (a “baby”
CAL 46).
So, to the original poster’s question. What is “”My” definition of a
blue water vessel (and this is always a personal opinion, so take it for what it is worth) as compared to a Coastal Cruiser.
The coastal cruiser has the option of running for cover if there is advanced warning the
weather is going to degrade and if caught out is severe
weather holds together well enough that temporary
repairs will last a couple of days of bad weather at sea.
A “Blue Water” vessel can choose when to start a
passage but cannot run for cover much of the time. Repaired failures have to survive 10-30 days. The cyclic loads on
repairs work to pull anything apart. The redundancy of structure is key, a pulled bulkhead tabbing that has other good structure around it is easy to
repair as an example.
Part of the subjective nature of the question is derived from the ability of the crew to make good repairs and forge ahead.
The Polynesians could fix anything aboard with the tools and know how aboard the vessel. Thus a “Blue
Water Vessel”
A person with limited
repair skills (think “the engineering knack”) can do well with a very robust vessel.
Someone who has an eye to fix things in a semipermanent way while at sea can tolerate a vessel with far less initial robustness.
I guess a way to say this is “the combination of vessel design/build AND crew capability make a
blue water vessel”