The List

Since starting to talk about potentially buying a boat, we developed a spreadsheet of the sailing catamarans currently on the market. Nerdy, I know. The goal was to understand the range of boats available and what we could comfortably afford with the profits from our house sale. 

So far, we have more than 30 boats on the list ranging from a 22 year old 38’ Lagoon to a nearly brand new 44’ Fountaine Pajot. We also have some Leopards, a Seawind, a Manta, a Maverick and an Alpha on the list. Some are very nice and clean. Others would require some TLC to make the boat an adequate home.

We have been on Lagoons, Leopards and Fountaine Pajots but never on a performance catamaran. This weekend, we had the opportunity to get on a brand new Seawind 1160. While a brand new Seawind did not meet the price requirements to earn it a spot on our spreadsheet, we figured it can’t hurt to see the differences. More importantly, we met Steve who was the broker commissioning the boat. With decades of experience in the industry, Steve was a wealth of knowledge and very generous with his time. Every person from the sailing community we have met has been similar. My humble advice in the very beginning of this journey myself is to invest your time in meeting the people. Learn from other’s successes and failures. Be prepared to take all you learned and draw your own conclusions to build a life that’s right for you.

We are so grateful to cruiser forums and sailing YouTube channels for documenting their journeys purchasing their boats. It’s been immensely helpful seeing others go through the process. Much like buying your first house, no matter how much you feel like you have researched, it’s still daunting.

While I have zero aspirations to film my life and upload it on YouTube, I can write down our experiences. I started writing down this decision-making and boat researching process for our own memories. But now I hope that someday, someone might read this and feel inspired to take the leap of faith to do it too. Since I’m the writer and Tom is the former professional photographer, we did create an Instagram account to share our adventures.