We lived aboard and extensively cruised our flybridge L440 also. The flybridge is fantastic - it provides an extra living space, awesome for
docking,
anchoring, picking up moorings, coastal navigating, star gazing on night passages and of course, helming under sail. The armchair critics will tell you it's not safe or too exposed for
water sailing">blue
water sailing (of course they've never even sailed on a flybridge cat in blue water) but that is rubbish! It's the safest place to be. Any green water coming over the
deck sailing to windward in rough ocean conditions is well below the crew on the flybridge..... sure it's windy but we're sailors; and there's always the auto pilot and the absolute protection of the aft
deck or
saloon.There isn't a sailboat ever built that is perfect without design/engineering flaws or compromises - and the compromise with the flybridge is a high boom and I'll be honest, I learned to live with it and
work out a safe technique for accessing the reef lines on the leech of the
mainsail when they sometimes twist and jam with the luffing sail...... of course, good seamanship dictates reefing early on
offshore passages before conditions get too boisterous.
Once you have a flybridge cat you won't go back.
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