looking for advice in planning stages of moving family of 5 onto a boat

[JPA Cate]

Originally Posted by spughy

LOL I let the kids name our dinghy. It's officially "Cutie-pie Kraken". Because they wanted to name the big boat "Kraken" but it already had a cool name I didn't want to change, and a 9' Walker Bay doesn't justify a full-on "Kraken" name...

Well done! I enjoyed this post and the one above.

Fair winds to you and the kids,

Ann

[Gin-N-Sonic]

Originally Posted by sliceoflife

Hi Folks,

this is my first post here.

about us:

Wife and I are both 36, 3 kids, 9,6,4. Live in Canada in the suburbs of Toronto. We own a physical therapy clinic and homeschool all 3 of the kids.

Nice to hear from another near Torontonian. You're off to a good start with the kids for this lifestyle

Originally Posted by sliceoflife

Neither of us love the suburban keeping up with the jones' lifestyle and want to travel with our kids and show them the world, to give them and ourselves different perspective on life and what really matters.

I'm going to be quite direct here, everybody who is a liveaboard or a cruiser, does not give a *bleep* about the Jones. No one will understand this lifestyle choice, new cruisers and liveaboards often find out who their true friends are AFTER they make their choices.

Originally Posted by sliceoflife

I'm very handy, proficient in most building trades, electrical, plumbing, carpentry etc. Spent the last year gutting and rebuilding our home. Pretty decent with engine repair and troubleshooting engine issues with cars and small engines.

Good, please take the time to practice laying up fiberglass. You should consider avoiding buying things that you can build. If you like building things and keeping yourself busy, you're in for a treat.

Originally Posted by sliceoflife

Most of my boat experience is with power boats in cottage country. I have some experience sailing on Lake Ontario, mostly just day sails. Haven't sailed at all in the ocean.

That's fine, take all the Cansail courses, consider getting the eldest child involved.

Originally Posted by sliceoflife

To fund the venture we would our house here. If we did that, we would have about $1.5-2M in cash. I'd like to keep the boat budget under $250K if possible. From the research i've done, speaking with other families of similar size etc , we would be looking at purchasing a catamaran in the 39-45 foot range.

under 250K Canadian? This may be a bit tricky. Aim for something with 4 cabins of you're serious about the liveaboard lifestyle.

Originally Posted by sliceoflife

I know the first thing we should do is probably do a charter for a couple weeks or so to give us an idea of what its actually like living on a boat. That is something we're looking into.

Yes, please do this as a minimum, alternatively the Harbourfront Center sailing school also has a liveaboard training program in the Caribbean.

Originally Posted by sliceoflife

I have a bunch of questions about cruising life, but im going to get this post out there for input first !

More questions and no, there is nothing wrong with choosing a sailing catamaran.

Originally Posted by sliceoflife

Thanks in advance for your advice !

Welcome aboard the madness.

[SY Kelpie]

A word about boat choice: yes there is lots of space (i.e. volume) in a modern wide-sterned shallow-bilged production boat, e.g. Beneteau/Bavaria/Jeanneau/.
There may also be a lot of cabins.
This is all good, but big open cabin spaces aren't all that useful, after a point.
We recently bought our future liveaboard yacht, and ended up going with something older which packed in a lot more stowage (i.e. lockers) than the more modern boats.
We looked at some newer boats and found that the headroom and feeling of spaciousness was great, but when you opened up lockers often they were very shallow or already occupied by the water tanks, calorifier, fridge compressor, etc. The remaining locker space didn't seem adequate to us for liveaboard use.
Perhaps the more modern boats are designed with the charter market in mind, where people will have only a small amount of luggage to stow.
And yes I know it's all a bit of a generalisation, and I do think modern production boats have a lot of great qualities, but just wanted to make the point that 'space' is about more than just overall hull volume- it's how it is apportioned as well.

[sliceoflife]

Reviving my original post here…

A lot has happened since my original post !

We sold our home and business near Toronto in early 2022 before the bubble started to burst and have been spending our time along the Treasure coast in Florida.

We’ve been getting some sailing in, mostly on mono’s, and have been out on a friends Lagoon 450 a few times.

We have been actively looking for boats, but it has been tricky to find what we want at a reasonable price likely due to covid and the affect it’s had on supply.

My original budget of $250k has nearly tripled… also thanks to covid and inflated property prices.

So … looking for a 4-5 cabin catamaran, ideally 45-55 ft range .

Open to suggestions on boats that would be suitable.

Thanks

[Sailor Sailor]

Three and a half years after your first post on the same topic, and you still do not know what boat to buy???

Hire a professional consultant to help you with the decision. The efficacy of asking on a forum should be obvious by now.