One More Time Around: Sailboat or Trawler

My wife and I thought we'd like to get into boating. It seemed to be a nice way to travel and a cheap way to live. We were going to make it a lifestyle and live aboard. The kind of boat was important. We wanted a boat that would take us anywhere in uncompromising safety. This would allow us complete freedom in our choices of where to go, even if we wanted to cross oceans. That was many boats ago, and we now look back on three years of living aboard, and the oceans we crossed and didn't cross.

The type of boats we have chosen through the years have been a product of our sense of adventure, our knowledge of boats and boating and now our age. As novices we were blind to the restrictions imposed by requiring an 'ocean crossing' boat. We didn't really know if we wanted to cross oceans, we just wanted to be able to. It turned out that we really didn't want to cross oceans after all, and had we known that from the beginning we might have settled on a completely different boat - but back then the sense of adventure ruled and we wanted to be ready for anything.

So after contacting every dealer in the United States we ended up buying an Alberg designed, full keel, Bristol 27 sloop w/ 10hp diesel auxiliary, from a dealer we never met (because we took delivery at the factory in Bristol Rhode Island).

We lived our dream working summers and cruising winters. The only source of power the sail boat sported was the car type starting battery for the little diesel. And that battery would barely run the anchor light all night. We rowed a 2 man blow up dinghy back and forth to work from our spot in the anchorage. Our time aboard was without running water or refrigeration. Our winter cruises took us to the Chesapeake, Keys, Bahamas and Caribbean.

Later in life, we tried a 35' trawler with all the conveniences and comforts. It was over 250 miles from our house and we always had to begin our cruises from the same place...one soon runs out of places to explore on a weekend given a less than 50 mile cruising radius. The trawler was complicated and expensive. We only kept her for a year.

Today we have a very simple, yet comfortable boat. She's 28 feet long, 8 feet wide and is powered by the ubiquitous small block Chevy engine. She sports a Honda generator which will run her rooftop air conditioner, make hot water for a stand up shower and keep ice in a small chest freezer (from Walmart). Her aft deck is level with most docks so there's no stepping over or down to get aboard. She has stairs, not a ladder to get aboard while swimming. My dog uses the stairs down and up to swim ashore to go potty. The boat has a simple flybridge. Given our updated non-requirement for an 'ocean crosser' and our current knowledge of seamanship and weather, this boat would have been perfect for us when we first took to the water, not to mention that she has positive floatation so she's unsinkable . Oh, and did I mention that Big Duck makes a dynamite camping trailer as well, allowing us to enjoy the road AND start our cruises from many different locations.