If you want slow, comfortable, roomy, good load carrying and capable of taking a battering in almost any conditions then take a look at some young second hand monos in the 10 to 12m range. There appears to be a lot of these on the market as older baby boomers lose interest in sailing often due to wife and family no longer having interest in sailing. Older baby boomers are in mid 70s. They would have needed to look after themselves to be capable of handling a comfortable cruising yacht at that age.
Some advice that I can offer is that any boat you acquire for long term use should be capable of single handed operation. It is difficult to find crew unless you have the money to pay them.
There is a Radford 11m, built in 2011, penned near the 18m proa that has been on the market here in Melbourne for about a year. Its price is now USD60k. It appears in good condition externally but I have not seen inside. I expect if you look globally you will find absolute bargains but make certain they are properly surveyed.
There is a 2009 Beneteau 50 also penned near the 18m proa that was acquired by the existing owner for USD150k 4 years ago. The original owner and his wife spent two years cruising on it in early retirement and then the wife said that was all she had to offer. A Beneteau 50 set up with electric winches and a decent motor is capable of single handed operation. They have the internal volume of a small apartment. The current owner is almost live-aboard. He prefers the boat to the small apartment that his wife and daughter live in.
I am also aware of an almost complete 42ft catamaran that has been 8 years in the making. The owner was diagnosed with cancer a year ago and is now in poor health and unlikely to recover. I know he enjoyed the building process but he will never enjoy the result of his efforts. His family now have the task of finding a buyer. The message here is that you never know what is around the corner so the long path of deciding on a boat to build, building the boat then tuning the boat before sailing off into the sunset comes with risk that increases with the time it takes. I have seen boats that have taken years to build, used regularly for a couple of years before the value is questioned then sold, usually at a substantial loss.
If a yacht is not being used regularly it is just a money sink. It needs a safe mooring, often expensive. It needs regular maintenance including anti-fouling, often expensive. It needs to be insured, inevtitably expensive. These ongoing costs diminish the value of the yacht and prompt price drops for quick sale.
All that said, I expect a HP could be built for a lower cost for a given load carrying ability than any catamaran. It only has one loaded hull that is a box beam and a roomy accommodation hull that has low loads and good proportions. It would be longer than the cat, which is good for sailing, but more expensive to pen at a marina. Also note that most marina pens are designed for monos side-by-side and cats can require a double pen so will be more expensive to pen.
Rick
On 14 Aug 2019, at 4:19 am, StoneTool owly@ttc-cmc.net [harryproa] <harryproa@yahoogroups.com.au> wrote:Thanks for the responses......... Performance is great, however my interest is in long term voyaging, not weekending and vacation trips from a shore base with an occasional longer crossing as seems to be more typical. Payload matters, not because I need a lot of conveniences of home, but because supplies, spares, and tools add up far faster than most folks seem to realize, and I believe they fail to count many items. Including just crew weight including clothing and shoes, bedding, and other personal items, dinghy, ground tackle, and many things one might consider part of the boat because they have been "permanently installed". looking at one multihull designed for 4 people, the difference between design empty displacement and waterline displacement was only 1500 lbs. With 4 crew members, and their personal items, 1200 lbs seems a safe bet.... bodies, clothing, foul weather gear, safety gear, etc. That leaves 300 lbs for everything else, including food and water! Many of the older factory builts simply do not have readily available published figures. The result is that most multihulls are I suspect overloaded most of the time. The larger "condocats" are so loaded up with convenience junk, that the payload for the size of the boat is pathetic.My seeming obsession with payload is automatically translated by some folks into a desire to carry lots of conveniences, entertainment systems and junk. The truth is actually the opposite, I am inclined toward the spartan. What I DO care about is the ability to carry a reasonable complement of tools and spares to the extent that I can effect repairs and maintenance under most circumstances both at sea an in some remote ill equipped port. When living aboard long term while voyaging, safety, reliability, comfort, low upkeep, etc, would seem to be more important that performance in most circumstances, the exceptions being dodging weather and major storms, and making coastal day hops that are right on the edge between being a day sail or and overnighter. The latter is especially relevant when sailing solo in coastal traffic areas.It seems that multihull designers either focus on performance, or on floating condos... the exception of course is Wharram designs that do not seem to excel at anything other than having lots of deck space.
H.W
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Posted by: Rick Willoughby <rickwill@bigpond.net.au>
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