Stockholm Syndrome...

The other day while avoiding some needful sanding of fiberglass I found myself intrigued by one of those never ending threads on a forum about sailboat gear...

As usual, someone popped up and stated categorically that if something costs more it's better and the old chestnut "you get what you pay for" is a stone cold fact.

Being bored by such stupidity (but still unwilling to sand fiberglass) I found myself reading another thread about anchoring rights (or lack of) in Florida and found myself confronted by another idiot person of strong opinion who seemed to think that rich people's rights to an uncluttered view from their palatial shore side homes free of mythical derelict boats was more important than a boater's right to anchor...

All of a sudden the idea of sanding fiberglass and the resulting itch waiting for me was looking a lot more entertaining than reading the forum in question.

Now, truth be told, I actually enjoy working on the boat and even sanding fiberglass, once I've actually got started it's, if not enjoyable, at least a great way to clear your mind and think...

So, while sanding all of a sudden two words popped into my head.

Stockholm Syndrome

All of as sudden I knew why so many otherwise smart people who sail and cruise tend to take the side of the 1%, greed heads, and exploiters even when it is against their own best interests...

Not a bad day when you come to think of it...

That bit of hull is now fairer, I have a bit of clarity on why a certain group of boaters seem to be idiots, and I've discovered that a little talcum powder makes the fiberglass itch a lot more bearable.

Nope, not a bad day at all.

It's really just about mindset...

Happiness is a place between too little and too much.

                                            -Finnish proverb

The other day I read something from a couple who referred to their Brewer designed Whitby 42 as a "small" boat. They also remarked about how that they had to give up a lot as well as become super resourceful to make such a cramped space livable.

I suppose it all depends on where your head is at I guess...

The Whitby 42, from where I sit, is anything but small. Fact is, Ted Brewer was better than most designers at shoehorning maximum livability, useful stowage, and ergodynamics that actually work so that the Whitby 42 has an accommodation that a lot of fifty-foot boats would envy.

Of course, if you think something is small and cramped you'll most likely color your reality to fit.

Some friends of ours used to have a Gulfstar 37 and they liked it so much that when a good deal on a Gulfstar 50 popped up they decided to upsize as they were planning to do a circumnavigation...

Fast forward a few years near the end of the circumnavigation on the Gulfstar 50 and our friend mentioned they'd been foolish to get the fifty-footer because it was too big, too expensive, and too much work. Last I heard from them he was hoping to do a straight over trade of his Gulfstar 50 for his old Gulfstar 37 because "It was just perfect".

We lived on our 26-foot Jessie Cooper for a bit over four years and never felt it was too small or cramped and, while even I will use the word small when describing the first Loose Moose, we never had an issue with it's diminutive size as it completely fulfilled our needs at the time. The reason we upsized was not that it was too small but simply because our requirements had changed. That said, I suspect, that the reason we did not find the Jessie Cooper design too small or cramped was simply that our mindset was positive...

Simple as that.

Take five minutes...

To steal a line from Dickens...

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..."

From where I sit those words have a lot to do with the current state of affairs where boats are concerned. I'm not sure if you've been paying attention on the price of good used boats lately but, just in case you haven't, the cost of boats in reasonable condition is at an all time low. Spend five minutes on just about any sailboat listing page, Craig's List, or owners associations and you'll find boats at rock bottom prices selling for pennies on the dollar... That's the "best of times" part.

Of course, one of the reasons the price of good boats has fallen so low is a horrible economy for those folks who used to be able to afford a boat, the rent on a marina berth to put it in, and had spare time to be able to go sailing but, sadly, for a lot of people in the rapidly disappearing middle class a boat no longer represents fun and freedom but simply a financial burden they can no longer afford... Interesting how the "best" and "worse" go hand in hand like that.

I won't bore you with my thoughts on the "wisdom" and "foolishness" because there's so much foolishness about it's hard to miss and, as far as wisdom is concerned, while something of a rarity these days there is still enough to go around...

Which brings me to a boat I saw for sale up in MD. A 1968 Columbia 36 selling for less than $8K. Now the thing I found remarkable is the fact that less than $8000 for a boat in apparently good shape with pretty much all the needful gear is not very remarkable at all these days. 

It's just normal.

my VolksCruiser Want List part three

I'll get this out of the way from the GetGo... Affordable IS important.

So, back to the list:

• Affordable to build or buy
• Affordable to cruise and maintain on a tight budget

The hard part when the word affordable comes into play is it means different things to different people. What's affordable to a person making $100K a year and someone making $50K are quite different things and not a lot of rocket science involved to figure that one out. Simple.

Where the hard comes in, is that society is relentless in telling everyone that they need to consume in a way that has nothing whatsoever with one's actual financial state of affairs... Hence, when I open up a copy of a new yachting rag it's mostly about telling me I need stuff that is silly expensive and the sort of boat I really should have costs $850K...

What's worse for those who can't afford an $850K boat is the relentless pressure to conform. So whatever boat they get should emulate said $850K boat in terms of systems and accoutrements, resulting in the sort of silliness that accounts for the word McMansion (or, should we say McYacht?).

That said, it doesn't tell you what is an affordable sailboat for you and what you should budget for sailing off into the sunset, now does it? As it happens I've been looking for some cunning formula that would tell me what I should pay for a boat and how much I should spend to actually cruise for decades and, while I hate to say it, I'm still looking.

What I use at the moment is flawed but is as good as any... I start with the amount I feel I could comfortably cruise on and then work backwards towards what a boat should actually cost me.

• Affordable to cruise and maintain on a tight budget

So, here's something a lot of people don't realize ...

Just about everyone I know cruising is actually living on a tight budget.

From my observations, the reason for this sorry state of affairs is just about everyone is living that little bit beyond their means. The bottom line being that the guy cruising the rehabbed Down Easter 38 with a budget of $1000 a month is in exactly the same boat as the guy on a $3000 budget with an Island Packet 370 in that they are both spending 10-30% more than they can really afford.

The easy fix, that I most often hear, is to simply wait until you have more money before you get a boat... From where I sit it might be an easy solution but, like most things easy, it doesn't really work. With more money the guy with the  Down Easter would instead buy a 42 foot something or other and the guy with the Island Packet would be out and about in his Island Packet 460 and their new upsized budgets of $1300 and $3900 would still be in that 10-30% too little zone. 

Well, that's my opinion...

The hard answer is simple as well but it involves getting honest with yourself, lifestyle change, and getting off the consumerist-keeping-up-with-the-Jones-treadmill. The first step, and yes dear reader, a painful one for most, is to downsize from a want to need level...

More on this soonish.

my VolksCruiser want list part two...

So, having had the want list percolate for a couple of days I find pretty much everything on the list can pretty much be reclassified to go into the "Need" list...

The exceptions being:

• Shoal draft (1 meter or less) That will dry more or less upright
• Outboard motor
• Standing headroom (6'6") would be nice where needful

While I really want less than three feet of draft, for a variety of very good reasons I should add, I can get along quite well with a boat that has five feet of draft. Keeping in mind that with legs I can still dry out upright... So we'll continue to classify the three feet or less draft as a "want" rather than a "need".

While an outboard motor is my preferred method of auxilliary propulsion it really is more a "want" rather than a "need" because there is nothing wrong with an inboard motor.

As for the headroom... Face it, designers simply don't design boats with folks who are 6'5" in mind and, more often than not, when they do in a less than 36-foot envelope the results are seldom very good. So, standing headroom where needful is demoted to whatever I can get by with.

Next we'll talk about the word affordable...

Speaking of want lists...

This TED talk really struck a chord for me. It has nothing to do with boats and Need/Want lists yet everything to do with boats and Need/Want lists...

My VolksCruiser want list...

Such as it is.

What I want...

• A boat that's seaworthy
• Shoal draft (1 meter or less) That will dry more or less upright
• Affordable to build or buy
• Affordable to cruise and maintain on a tight budget
• Simple user servicable redundant systems
• Outboard motor
• Integrated wind vane self-steering
• A comfortable double bed at least 7' long 
• One good sea berth
• Sufficient accessible stowage for needful tools/materials & parts
• A comfortable place for two to read/lounge/play music
• Small but efficient galley
• A head I can shower in without making a mess
• Dedicated accessible stowage for a reasonable quiver of guitars
• Sensible stowage for two real bikes
• Stowage for six months of provisions
• Space on deck for a good rowing dinghy

and, yeah...

• Standing headroom (6'6") would be nice where needful

Next we'll look at that list a little closer to see what's missing or doesn't pass the need test...

Simple stuff...

There are times when reading the yachting press (in those rare times when my scum sucking zinio app actually works) that I feel that we're not looking at boats anymore but some crazed rendering of the "Blind men and an elephant" sort...

A while back when I was talking about the Columbia 26, a lot of folks wrote the blog asking why I liked it because it didn't have one feature or another that some other blog or sailing magazine had told them that a proper cruising boat had to do or have any number of things that a simple 26-foot boat was simply never going to have or do... Because, you know, it's a 26-foot boat.

The Columbia 26 MK2 for its size delivers, as far as I'm concerned, a pretty impressive list of stuff you need in a cruising boast for someone on a budget...

• It sails well
• It's well built
• Has a well thought out ergonomic interior that works
• Has better than average stowage
• They're available
• They're cheap (as such things go)

From where I sit the only downsides of such a boat are that it's a boat of a certain age and it's more than likely that it will need some TLC factored into the program. That said, it is a small boat so there's not going to be that much work or expense compared to something bigger.

In other words, it pretty much nails the whole need list for a boat of the VolksCruiser ilk...

An alarming number of people seemed to think that the Columbia 26 MK2 was somehow lacking and I got numerous emails comparing it to other boats that were either substantially bigger, more expensive, or completely different...

The elephant is much like a snake...

The lesson I learned a long time ago is that you can't look at sailboat design as a group comparison thing or as a this boat vs that boat contest. Every boat is different and needs to be looked at with eyes wide open and taking it all in. The question you need to ask whether it's about the Columbia 26 MK2, a CAL 34, a Morgan Out Island 41, or a Whatever 38 is whether or not this particular boat will do what you need it to do.

That's it. Trust me, spreadsheet feature comparison shopping for a boat will leave you just where it did the guy who said...

The elephant is quite like a a wall...

Fact of the matter is there are so many good boats and designs floating around it's pretty easy to find a good boat that will do what you need. The problem is mostly not about the right boat it's almost always about the person looking for a boat having insignificant focus to see what their own needs actually are...

 The elephant is much like a tree...

So, the key to what boat works for fulfilling your needs is to not look at boats or listen to people talking about boats (including me) but to simply look in the mirror and sort out what you actually need.

and yeah, I did say 20-feet...

It's interesting what will send folks to their keyboards to tell me I'm misinformed.This week's trigger word seemed to be 20-feet.

So, here's a layout for a 20-foot sailboat you could easily cruise in...

The boat in question is the Pop 20 from BG Yacht Design...

It's a pretty cool boat. Somewhere between a CAL 20 and a Muscadet so, while not really breaking any new ground, it's a good example of what you can do with a 20-foot envelope.

Of course, if you're going to cruise such a diminutive craft you'll sort out systems and adapt the interior to maximize storage but nothing along the lines of rocket science.

To see what can be done with a 20-foot boat here's a link to someone who has extensively cruised, lived aboard, and sailed to Hawaii on a CAL 20.

Might be cruising in a minimalist boat is not for everyone but it is doable...

So, what exactly does small mean anyway?

How things change...

Back in 1996 when we were in the Canaries waiting for the the trades to kick in so we could sail to Martinique, our boat, "Loose Moose 2", at 38 feet was actually larger than the average cruising boat. My guesstimate at the time was that the typical cruising boat averaged somewhere between thirty to thirty-two feet though I'm pretty sure if I had really done the math in a serious study, I'd have discovered that the average cruising boat might have been closer to twenty-nine feet.

At the time I don't recall ever hearing anybody complain about not having a big enough boat... That said, I often heard, especially among older experienced cruisers, the desire for a smaller boat.

Of course, today any boat under forty feet is considered small... Judging from the number of boats I see here in the Caribbean I'd expect you'd find that the average size of boat cruising is now hovering somewhere around forty-five feet.

So, where does that leave VolksCruisers size wise? Offhand the numbers that pop into my head for a size range is twenty to forty-two feet. Less than twenty is simply unworkable for most and over forty-two feet is just too expensive. The sweet spot being the twenty-seven to thirty-six foot zone because there is a lot of good classic plastic in that niche going for very little.

Right now I'm looking to downsize to a smaller boat around thirty-feet partly because a thirty-foot boat would be substantially cheaper to cruise and less work to sail/maintain than a thirty-four foot one. The other main reason for downsizing is I really miss serious shoal draft which would also go a long way to making cruising cheaper and easier for my future plans...

Like the man said "small boats, small problems" makes all kinds of sense and, while it might seem to be going against the trend, you really might want to be thinking smaller rather than larger.