First purchase

[Adelie]

Welcome to CruisersForum!

I would suggest updating your profile with your general location and your boat make & model or “Looking” or Looking to Crew" in the "Boat" category. This info shows up under your UserName in every post in the web view. Many questions are boat and/or location dependent and having these tidbits under your UserName saves answering those questions repeatedly. If you need help setting up your profile then click on this link: https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...ml#post3308797

I would happily help more if the link above is not enough.

[Reeve21]

I moved up from a dingy to a first cruising boat 26 feet long.

That was all I could handle at the time, both on the hard (maintenance), in the water and financially.

Bigger boats can be more stable, but the forces on the sails and the inertia when docking or mooring are also greater.

A gradual approach to size increases worked for our family, now in our fourth decade of coastal cruising on our fourth and largest boat. To honest if I had the funds at the time I would have gone larger, but looking back I'm glad how things worked out. I had a friend who bought a 42 foot boat right out of the box for himself, wife and young daughter. He couldn't raise the sails unless he had other folks aboard.

[TrentePieds]

Reeve said: " I had a friend who bought a 42 foot boat right out of the box for himself, wife and young daughter. He couldn't raise the sails unless he had other folks aboard."

A fairly common cruising ketch of 42 feet, say a Choy Lee 42, will have a mainsail of just over 300 SqFt or roughly 35 SqYrd. A typical weight of cloth will be 10 oz/SqYd so the total weight of cloth will be 350 oz. Add thereto the "workings" so let's be generous and call the weight of the finished sail 700 oz. at 16 oz to the pound, which makes it roughly 45 lbs. A 150 Genoa is bigger, but the cloth is lighter, so, there again, a reasonable estimate of the sails weight would be about 45 lbs. All other sails are smaller, even if heavier cloth, so no sail in a 42-footer is likely to weigh more than 45 lbs.

If, therefore, a grown man cannot raise the sails by himself, it is a sure sign that the sail handling gear is not set up correctly.

Assume now that the drum diameter of the halyard winches for the Mainsl and the Headsl is 4", i.e. radius is 2", which is quite common, and the length of crank is 12", also quite common, then the mechanical advantage offered by the winch is 6:1. The "push" (or pull) the winchman has to apply to the crank to lift (hoist) the entire weight of the sail is therefore a mere eight pounds or thereabouts.

Hardly taxing for a grown man or even a slight woman.

A major contributor to making life aboard difficult is taking all sail handling gear back to the cockpit. It introduces far, far too much friction in the operation of the gear.

TrentePieds

[Reeve21]

Originally Posted by TrentePieds

Reeve said: " I had a friend who bought a 42 foot boat right out of the box for himself, wife and young daughter. He couldn't raise the sails unless he had other folks aboard."

A fairly common cruising ketch of 42 feet, say a Choy Lee 42, will have a mainsail of just over 300 SqFt or roughly 35 SqYrd. A typical weight of cloth will be 10 oz/SqYd so the total weight of cloth will be 350 oz. Add thereto the "workings" so let's be generous and call the weight of the finished sail 700 oz. at 16 oz to the pound, which makes it roughly 45 lbs. A 150 Genoa is bigger, but the cloth is lighter, so, there again, a reasonable estimate of the sails weight would be about 45 lbs. All other sails are smaller, even if heavier cloth, so no sail in a 42-footer is likely to weigh more than 45 lbs.

If, therefore, a grown man cannot raise the sails by himself, it is a sure sign that the sail handling gear is not set up correctly.

Assume now that the drum diameter of the halyard winches for the Mainsl and the Headsl is 4", i.e. radius is 2", which is quite common, and the length of crank is 12", also quite common, then the mechanical advantage offered by the winch is 6:1. The "push" (or pull) the winchman has to apply to the crank to lift (hoist) the entire weight of the sail is therefore a mere eight pounds or thereabouts.

Hardly taxing for a grown man or even a slight woman.

A major contributor to making life aboard difficult is taking all sail handling gear back to the cockpit. It introduces far, far too much friction in the operation of the gear.

TrentePieds

Reeve said: " I had a friend who bought a 42 foot boat right out of the box for himself, wife and young daughter. He couldn't raise the sails unless he had other folks aboard."


I should have said "wouldn't" raise the sails, not "couldn't."


As a novice himself he wasn't comfortable essentially singlehanding a 42 foot boat with a genoa and large main. Not a strength issue, but my point being that bigger boats can be a handful, especially when you are new to the game.....

[TrentePieds]

Ah - that puts a different complexion on the matter :-)

Your friend was wise to be cautious. The essential difference between skippering a "small" boat and a "big" boat is that in a small boat, things can go wrong very fast but are seldom very serious when they do. In big boats, and the bigger the boat, the more pronounced this is, things tend to go wrong slowly, but inexorably, and they are almost always quite serious when they do.

It is also characteristic of things going wrong in big boats that often one thing going wrong triggers a cascade of things going wrong, and that it can take a combination of practical knowledge derived from experience and of sheer native bloody-mindedness to get them back under control. Some people have the knowledge but not the bloody-mindedness, others have the bloody-mindedness but not the knowledge.

It is possible to enhance whatever native quantum you may have of each by sailing under a competent skipper. It is far less possible to do so "single-handing" ab initio

That, in my view, is a compelling reason for starting with a small boat, something around 27 feet. I happen to dislike the Catalina 27 with considerable passion having taught quite a number of people ab initio on that type of boat. A boat in the same size and price range that I much, much prefer is the Columbia 26. If you have a chance to sail each of them, you'll divine why I hold that opinion.

Most people that were not born "upon their father's ship as she wuz lyin' to, some twenty-five or thirty miles soueast of Baccalieu" do not take naturally to sailing. Wives and children CAN learn to like it but only under a skipper that exudes both competence and confidence. It is, therefore, IMO, NOT sensible to try to learn from scratch AS A FAMILY. Doing that militates against having unquestioning confidence in whichever member of the family is to be skipper.

In my teaching days - two or three couples or families together aboard a big boat - I found that the pater familias would often get in my way by trying to "teach" HIS wife "how to sail". That particular psychology can be enormously damaging to the entire teaching/learning environment. Instructors have to develop a "bed-side manner" that keeps it contained while instruction lasts. A person male or female that is not yet a competent skipper and instructor cannot that.

And there you have another reason why "learning as a family" may not be a good idea.

All the best :-)!

TrentePieds