As much as I would like the whole process to be done with, I think that may be a good outcome. I think it’s valuable to have that mental conditioning to understand that there are other boats out there, and that a few rejections are probably part of the path to finding the right one. With that, however, we’ve pretty much eliminated as a possibility everything currently on the market up here in terms of either price or condition. It’s spring, and brokers are excited, and indeed there have been an uptick in sales, so perhaps they have some reason to be. However, it’s made it difficult to negotiate on price, and we haven’t found the sweet spot of a boat we like at a price we think it is worth yet.

We were somewhat prepared for this, because the local market has a reputation for good boats and relatively strong sales, but when you are looking at specific boats and particular price points, reputation counts for nothing. We are looking for a solid platform to live and sail on for the next decade or more and it’s going to absorb a significant percentage of our savings to buy it, so the boat itself absolutely has to be worth the money, not simply the beneficiary of some presumption that Northwestern boats are “better.” So we were all ready to head south to California to continue our shopping spree.

We hear bad things about California boats, particularly those in Southern California: a climate unfriendly to rigging, dark murmurs of general neglect, aspersions of un-seamanlike conduct. How much of this is the generally negative disposition native Pacific Northwesterners hold toward Californians and how much is grounded in fact remains to be seen, but in general, the pricing for like models tends to be lower than we find up here and perhaps that’s indicative of the common condition.

What I suspect is that you find good sailors and well-maintained boats all over, just as you can find bad ones. If it’s smart to buy the worst house in the best neighborhood, maybe it’s also good policy to look for the best boat in the worst marina. In this case, California represents the worst marina within easy reach. We know folks who have found very solid, well-found vessels at excellent prices down south. So we started looking at airline tickets and packing our bags in preparation to take a late May swing through the Golden State.

Then my wife sprained her foot. Suddenly, the prospect of stumping around the hills of San Francisco and clambering on and off of rough docks and shifting boats seems considerably more daunting and unlikely. It’s too soon to say how soon she’ll be up and moving again, but for the moment, our boat search has slid to a halt into a big windless stretch of water.

Although it’s unpalatable, it may also be a good time for a pause in the process. We fully expect many of the boats that have just come into the market to drop in price the longer they sit, just as their predecessors have, and the longer the owners are making payments and writing checks for slip fees, the stronger our negotiating position. Although sales have ticked up, they have hardly exploded, and the surge is unlikely to last past spring, while financing remains difficult and we continually see deals implode. While it’s too complex of a process to over-generalize, we think time works for us, even as we find it painful to look out the windows on sunny days to watch rippling white triangles cutting across the Sound while we sit firmly ashore.

We also have to do some hard thinking about our long-term plans. While we can still come out ahead by buying a boat in California and trucking it up here, we’ve often talked (never more so than this past winter while our hatch was frozen shut) about wintering in Mexico. If that’s a goal, then it seems a little dumb to pay to have the boat moved up here when we’re just going to take it right back down there.

But what then? If we are going to make that move, we need to start structuring our businesses to accomodate it now; and in any event, we have commitments in Seattle through early fall. It seems equally silly to buy a boat now and let it sit down there all summer… so should we even be shopping right now? And if we’re not, then our decision to forgo leasing an apartment in favor of a quick search and purchase needs to be re-visited, since everyone who has generously been sharing their homes with us so far this spring never signed up for an all-summer stay. Would the cost of that apartment outweigh the shipping costs of a California boat to Puget Sound? And in that case, should we be shopping right now?

Beyond that, what of next year? If we do wait, buy in California, and winter in Mexico, would we come back to Puget Sound next spring, either taking the long, hard slog up the coast or via Hawaii as others recommend? Or would we continue south, heading for the Canal, and more distant goals: the Caribbean, the East Coast, Europe? These are big questions that are suddenly very real and very relevant, and we weren’t really ready for them.

If time suddenly seems a little fuzzy for me, it may be because all the decisions of the next five years are suddenly crowding into the room, creating some sort of wormhole effect, and months seems like years and years like days. It’s my nature to try to understand things as best I can before I make decisions about them, but there is too much that is now unknowable and my feeble brain is having difficulty sorting out what is important. Mandy may have sprained her foot, but I feel like I have sprained my brain. There isn’t enough ice in the world to bring that swelling down.

An acquaintance told me recently to relax and enjoy the process. Either I’m just not wired that way or it’s really a little more fraught when you are searching for a home that can also sink (a more optimistic take on this might be that we’re looking for a home that can also float; seriously, have you float tested your condo lately? No? Perhaps we’re coming out ahead of features), and also deciding on the course of your life for the next decade or so.

Our expectations were fairly low; the economy has been better in Canada and much of the demand in the Puget Sound region that has kept prices relatively high compared to the rest of the country has been attributed by various brokers we have spoken with to Canadian buyers coming south searching for boat bargains… factors pointing to a pretty strong market north of the border, and therefore an unlikely place to find any likely candidates in our price range.

Technically speaking, the Canadian Sailcraft 40 we found isn’t in our price range. With a little negotiation we might get it there, though, and it could be well worth pursuing because it has become the sleeper hit of our search efforts.

There are not very many CS 40s running around out there and neither of us were familiar with the company or their boats before we starting looking at this one. I was expecting the usual: tired production cruiser with all the conventional choices and underwhelming history and performance.

What I found was a well-built, exceptionally well-maintained performance cruiser with a racehorse pedigree and a thoughtful, practical layout both on deck and below.

Designed by Tony Castro based in part on his one-tonner Southern Ocean racer Blade, the CS 40 has all the hallmarks of a design that will register at the sprightly end of the 40 foot cruiser range. With so few of them out there, it’s difficult to ascertain any sort of reputation, but the SA/D ratio is promising and what little I have found posted by owners is encouraging.

I also found some suggestions that the build quality was not particularly high, but from what we could see during our brief inspection, that was not the case at all. A chemically bonded hull/deck join, accessibly thru-hulls and systems, and beefy rod rigging all speak to some degree of attention to detail during manufacture. Moreover, the particular vessel we looked at was immaculate below; a bilge you could happily serve soup out of, no grime to speak of behind any of the access panels, clean, neatly run plumbing and electrical updates, all point to an owner with a serious approach to upkeep. Although the fancy electronic systems are aging quickly, to me it spoke well that all the basics were being taken care of first. The most recent involved plumbing and rigging upgrades and new batteries. Equally important to the recent upgrades was the overall pattern of the updates… installed at intervals over the past decades, they showed the hallmark of an active owner maintaining a working boat, rather than the cash dump in the last year or two that frequently indicates an owner trying to shine up a turd for quick sale.

The layout below didn’t hit 100% on our demanding wish list, but it got high marks nonetheless. The galley is deep and flush with storage, including what amounts to a half-height pantry against the aft bulkhead, nicely organized with sliding baskets… a touch we valued on our last boat that we hadn’t seen on another since.

The nav desk is large enough to be useable and provides a seat secure enough to use in a seaway. The rest of the main cabin offers no surprises with a fairly conventional drop-leaf-table-flanked-by-settees layout and a moderate amount of storage. The head, forward, does not have separate shower stall, but otherwise is appropriately laid-out. The v-berth has additional storage and plenty of head and foot room; as a plus, it’s sealed off from the anchor locker entirely.

The aft cabin provided the perfect compromise between the lavish spaciousness of the C&C 37+ aft cabin and the tight, barely-adapted enclosed quarter-berth of the Ericson 38. Without taking up considerably greater hull space than the Ericson aft cabin, the CS 40 somehow manages to still make the cabin look like a real, useable cabin rather than a walled-off pipe berth. Additionally, it provided an almost perfect seat and space for an office for me… a unique (albeit unintentional) feature among vessels we have viewed.

Because (and unlike the 37+) the cabin does not extend across the breadth of the vessel, however, there is still room for a substantial cockpit locker on the port side. Accessible from both cockpit and a smallish door in the galley bulkhead, this locker offers the perfect place to keep deck gear and spare sails without having to drag them back and forth through the cabin when needed. This is the best compromise we have found between lavish interior space and a useable, easily-managed deck layout.

Performance
This is the big question; she looks like she could be fast, and we’ve had a couple of comments from folks who claim to have once known a guy whose cousin had a girlfriend whose father once said he thought he saw one go like greased lightning, but we haven’t found anyone with first-hand experience sailing them to give us the skinny. If you happen to be one of those rare folks with some sail time aboard a CS 40, please comment! We’d love to hear more.

Layout
The interior layout is a mixed bag; Mandy is fairly well set on something with a separate aft cabin by now, and this has one but it doesn’t light her up the way the cabin on the 37+ does. I quite like it, as it would be excellent office space for me. Neither of us are all that thrilled that the head is forward and doesn’t have a separate shower stall. We are used to not having a shower stall, but we would have to adapt something to work as a wet locker further aft, and in general the combined absence is a black mark against the model. We’re not thrilled about the conventional layout of the salon either but expect we’ll have to live with something similar since so few boats offer a real alternative in that area.

Storage
Voluminous! This boat has hands-down the best interior storage of any we have looked at so far, particularly in the galley space. It manages to achieve this without dramatically impacting deck storage, which has been a drawback on other models we have seen. The cockpit lockers are not vast, but they are adequate and useable and we think this is generally the best example of balance between the two that we have seen so far.

Compromises
The head is the obvious big compromise on this model, and the price is just about out of our range. Given the relatively robust Canadian economy, it’s less likely we could bargain it down than with some of the boats down here in the States. We have recently been discussing the long-term impact of the pricing on our plans, as well. There is something to be said with leaving a chunk of change in the bank by buying something at the low-end of our price range so we have cash on hand for both some of the inevitable modifications and more flexibility to be out cruising instead of at the dock working. Of everything we have looked at, this boat may be the best kept and outfitted to sail away from the brokerage and cruise to Alaska with minimal modification, however, so we’re still undecided on that point.

There are a lot of Ericson 38s out there, and the -200 is the penultimate form. The primary changes to the line over the years have been to the interior. That goes some ways toward suggesting that designer Bruce King pegged the sailing qualities right on the first try. The 5’3″ shoal keel was originally standard but the deeper, better-performing 6’5″ seems to have become more popular on later versions and those are most of what we have seen on the market recently. The interior tweaks have all been for the better, so that the -200 has our much-desired aft head (with small, but serviceable separate shower stall) and a reasonable aft cabin. The table doesn’t fold away but neither does it intrude on the main fore/aft path through the cabin. The tankage is reasonable, by our standards, but does not detract from considerable storage space remaining throughout the interior. The brand has a following which, if not quite as rabid as the C&C junkies, still maintain an active and helpful website that can be immensely valuable to new owners. In short, the design fits well within our range of desired compromises and has some additional attractions outside that scale.

Unfortunately, the one we looked at originally was pretty well trashed… significant signs of water intrusion, leaking oil, heavy water damage to the sole, plumbing problems, ports that needed replacing and rebedding, an interior that was frankly just plain dirty, and an asking price out of touch with the reality of that situation. Had we sold our own boat yet at that point, we might have made a very low offer on it, but it wasn’t hard to walk away because the model is moderately prolific… the Ericson 38 came out in 1980 and the -200 version was introduced in 1986 and continued to roll off the line until 1998 courtesy of Pacific Seacraft, which bought Ericson in 1990. We didn’t have any trouble imagining those sister ships would be getting all the attention while this dog sat and grew moss for a few years.

Unbelievably, to us, someone actually bought the thing a couple of months later.

Most of the rest of them live in California or on the East Coast and we expected to have to take a trip to see one with a loaded checkbook in hand. Unexpectedly, however, the very boat we looked at last fall popped up on the market again suddenly last week. Was it too much of a project, we wondered? A newly inflated price tag suggested otherwise; perhaps she had fallen into the hands of a flipper, a mad venture in this market but then most boaters are mad to varying degrees. Either way, it was worth a trip up to Everett if only to sate our morbid curiousity, so we headed up for another look.

It turned out the buyer was a first-time sailboat owner who had since had a change of personal circumstances. A diesel mechanic by trade, he is the ideal previous owner… handy and attentive enough to have cleaned her up considerably and made numerous small repairs and upgrades, yet without enough time on his hands to have taken her out and put more wear and tear on her. Dropping down the companionway ladder this time was like stepping into a whole different boat. The sole had been repaired; much of the plumbing replaced; engine oil leaks repaired; the crazed cabin windows in the process of being replaced. He’d even taken a vacuum cleaner to her.

Much of what he had done was either cosmetic or relatively minor, however, and when you’re looking at a twenty year old boat, those are the cheap things to fix. We often look at general cleanliness and the small things as a proxy for the general level of care exhibited by the owner that would be likely to have carried over into the major things; in this case, though, we knew that the short span of loving care that she had been lavished with since December wasn’t going to make up for the years of neglect prior to that.

One of the benefits of checking out a boat that has changed hands recently is that you can usually get a look at a recent survey. We have become connoisseurs of sailboat surveys recently, and there are two kinds: useful surveys that tell you what is really going on with a given vessel, and paint-by-the-number surveys that exist primarily as an excuse to get something insured or a loan issued. You can usually spot the latter quickly by their use of big blocks of boilerplate punctuated by a few uninformative notes regarding trivialities such as flare replacement and light-bulbs having burnt out.

The one we were handed for this boat didn’t even catch the lightbulbs. Nor did it cover a number of other, more serious problems with hull or rig that we picked out within the first few minutes on deck (thanks, Brion!). However, any boat this age that hasn’t already had the work done is probably going to need the rigging replaced, and the coaming cracks are not structural problems (although one pesky crack at the bow extends back and out of sight behind the rub rail… exactly where the hull/deck join is in these boats).

All other things being equal, if we’d first laid eyes on this particular boat last week, we would have been inclined to put in an offer. We like the model and this one is not exorbitantly overpriced, although it is above the general range. But there are three others for sale right now down in California, each of them priced low enough to pay the difference in the cost of shipping them north, and of those, two are one or two owner boats with all the hallmarks of regular attention… small modifications to the interior or deck that tell you they have been owned by someone with an interest in maintenance. That sort of attention, over the long term, is far more valuable to us than any recent repairs or upgrades.

So, as much as it pains us to turn our backs on something so close to home, we’re probably going to pass on that one. Ignorance probably would have been bliss, but I’m confident we’ll be better off in the long run.

Performance
Reputed to point well and balance nicely, the Ericson 38 is nonetheless light enough to move along in light airs. They have something of a reputation of being excessively tender, which the current owner and a neighbor down the dock inadvertently reinforced when they mentioned they had buried the rail a couple weeks ago while out in ten knots of wind.

Layout
Although the basic shape of the interior layout comports well with our vision, some of the particulars will require adjustment; there is no ready-made desk space and some solution would have to be fashioned in one or the other of the cabins for my work station. The nav desk, as per usual, is postage-stamp sized and relatively worthless.

Storage
Storage, at least, is stellar. There is a nice combination of large and small spaces throughout the interior that could easily accomodate all our current junk and just about every other conceivable sort of junk we might buy. Storage space in the galley is somewhat light, but that is in our view obviated by the spaces available elsewhere. It’s only 38 feet, not like it would be a long walk to get the salt shaker if we had to stow it in the nav desk (and that may be all the nav desk is good for on this boat).

Compromises
There are not really too many compromises we would have to make for the Ericson; she has high marks in just about every category that is important to us. One significant concern is the embedded tie rod terminals; we like that the boat has a reinforced structural grid internally, but the tie rods between the deck chainplates and that grid are deeply embedded in fiberglass. There is no way to inspect the aluminum blocks that the rods thread into. While this arrangement should prove massively strong, and could be quite secure if there has been no water intrusion over the years, we know that the owner prior to this one didn’t keep up with developing leaks, and there is no real way of knowing what might have seeped down into those threads over the years. There would be some risk of that with any of these boats, but more with this one in particular.

This was a little sooner than we had imagined but forces seemed to align. We didn’t have a boat, of course, but we had a strong suspicion that we might find a better one to buy if we had some idea about how to rig them, so it seemed an ideal time to attend. And, we were house-sitting for some friends at Kala Point that particular weekend, which made the trip up to Brion’s shop at Point Hudson convenient.

We’d first met Brion and his wife Christian during the chaotic 24 hours of Lotus’ grounding, a fast-paced incident during which I could do little more than marvel at the dazzling demonstrations of nautical acumen on display. Even during the most pressing moments, however, Brion’s inclination toward teaching came through clearly: in the dead of night, by headlamp and flashlight, as he rigged the bridle critical to distributing the forces that would be involved in dragging the 102 ton vessel off the beach at 0500 the next morning, he nevertheless attracted a small crowd as he took the time to explain in detail what he was doing and why. Rapt young Boat School students wedged awkwardly wherever they could fit along the stern rail of the canted vessel to hear the impromptu lecture.

Thankfully, the back room at the loft is on a mercifully even keel, well-lit, and warm even on the most wintery spring day. Consequently, I picked up a lot more during the weekend class than I had on the chilly, rocking, dark deck of the Lotus… despite the best efforts of Ben, the friendly loft cat (as opposed to Audrey, the stand-offish loft cat), whose insistence that our actual purpose in attending the class was primarily to pet him was at times quite convincing. Fortunately, Ben took a time out for a nap atop some spare shackles and strops in the middle of our table and I managed to re-focus on what was happening in class.

As I suspected, much of what Brion does is actually magic, or at least math, which to me is pretty much the same thing. The theories, however, are accessible even to a layman (even if that layman requires his wife to deal with any actual calculating of numbers). To anyone with even a modicum of a sailing background, at some point about mid-way through the first day, the penny will drop and you will find yourself repeatedly saying, “So that’s why my boat is like that!” Because the underlying theme of the class is the inevitability of interacting forces as they impact the design of any craft bent on harnessing the wind to move through water… it is the foot-bone connected to the leg-bone connected to the thigh-bone, only played out in keels and hulls and shrouds the whole way from sea to sky.

While this makes the whole thing sound theoretical or perhaps meta-physical, the theory is interspersed with a considerable amount of hands-on practice that many neophyte sailors will not have previously had the opportunity to undertake, or at least not undertake properly. Among the hardest things, for me, was simply tying knots. It turns out it’s a lot more difficult to un-learn a knot you first learned to tie thirty or more years ago and re-learn it the Brion Toss way than it is to just learn it the Brion Toss way in the first place. On the other hand, the smooth and intuitive loops accompanied by explanations of not just what a knot is appropriate for but why it is, teaches you more about the basic craft of the sailor’s most important tool than you would learn in a hundred years of following rabbits in and out of holes.

If the hardware involved in rigging has seemed mysterious, Brion helps dispel it by forcing you to get right into the teeth of it with your own two hands. Assembling a Hanes or Sta-Lok terminal yourself is all it takes to demonstrate that it is not, in fact, black magic that is keeping your stick in the air, but an array of predictable forces and understandable mechanical connections that can be inspected, adjusted, and managed even without decades of nautical experience. If you’ve been too intimidated to punch a hole in your mast for wiring or hardware mounts, Brion shows you exactly how to do it and explains why it is not necessarily going to lead to the imminent collapse of that spar.

While all the information and practical interaction with real hardware was valuable, everyone’s favorite part of the class was the dock walk… a drizzly, on-site inspection of random sailboats stacked up along the floats at Point Hudson. Straggling along behind Brion, we squinted overhead and leaned down to minutely inspect fittings for cracks, deformation, or the harbinger of such defects, unfair leads. Gradually, with Brion’s gentle guidance, we became adept (or at least less utterly inept) at spotting rigging problems from the dock using nothing more than the Mark I eyeball and a strict application of that first rule of rigging: fair leads. Today, I find myself frightened to walk down any random dock after glancing around and quickly convincing myself every mast I see is a breath away from coming down on my head.

That none of them have so far is the ultimate lesson from the workshop. There is little in rigging that, once done, cannot be un-done again and one of Brion’s subtler points is that it is always possible to run the numbers and determine the ideal solution for your situation, even if that happens to differ from what you have already. Rigs are not immutable and neither are they necessarily perfect in their original factory configuration. If something is wonky or unpalatable, it’s not too late to take another look. And, if you’re in the same position we are in and haven’t bought a boat yet, knowing that there are options for failing rigs and having some idea how to price out the necessary repairs or upgrades very much strengthens your hand during the shopping process. We’ve already ruled out one boat on the basis of the necessary repair cost; some other sucker who hasn’t been through Brion’s workshop is going to pay twenty grand more for that boat than he thinks he is paying.

So we’ve managed to segue from an interesting educational interlude back into our more normal panicky boat shopping mode. Better equipped, better informed, and more inclined to dive in and fix potential problems with whatever boat we find… stay tuned!

We first became familiar with the Pretorien through another blog frequently featured on Three Sheets, SV Estrellita 5.10b. Her owners, Carol and Livia, put a considerable amount of detail about their preparations and outfitting the boat on the blog, and on the whole appear to be pretty happy with their selection. Since we have no experience whatsoever in selecting boats for cruising we’ve been cribbing from those who do, so when a Pretorien came up for sale in Seattle recently, we took a look.

The Pretorien is not exactly a swashbuckling boat, but it is a well-respected and widely lauded world cruiser in an affordable and manageable package. Like the C&Cs we looked at recently, the 35 is not actually 35 feet, but instead a shade over 37 feet long.

The Pretoriens were ’80s era boats and they look it today; traditional interiors, IOR-influenced lines, blister-prone hulls. Nonetheless, there is much to recommend them: heavy construction with attention to detail, stick-built interiors, thoughtful galley layout, voluminous storage. A plus or minus, depending on your perspective, was their relatively early adoption of saildrive propulsion… though this increases usable interior space and reduces drag, the early implementations were prone to corrosion and have a reputation of being difficult to maintain.

Michael Locatell, the broker representing the Pretorien we looked at, earns a spot on our gold list for local brokers: the original Wauquiez dealer in the Pacific Northwest, he is intimately familiar with the boats, the construction process, and with Henri Wauquiez himself. Vastly knowledgeable about sailboats in general, Locatell is happy to discuss not only the Wauquiez models but to share his experiences with other boats to compare and contrast the relative strengths. His practical and unbiased counsel are valuable enough, but what cemented our opinion of him was what happened when we asked a follow-up question about the length the day after we viewed the boat: he went down and measured her directly, bow-rail to stern, making a very accurate job of it despite numerous difficulties.

Unfortunately, that length was a bit of a problem for us… our current slip is 36 feet, putting this particularly Pretorien about three inches long. We’re not entirely averse to moving up a slip size, but it seems like a waste for a lousy three inches that is entirely unusable rail.

By itself, that seems a pretty trifling objection to a proven world-cruiser under six figures and over thirty feet. But maybe it’s the “world-cruiser” part itself that is part of the problem; we are just not world cruising people, and there is a lot of valuable world-cruising character built into these boats that detracts in other ways from our ideal picture. I wanted badly to like the Pretorien, but she is no more than number three or four on our running list of potential boats, Russell Crowe notwithstanding.

Our scorecard on the Pretorien 35:

Performance
Despite the IOR influence, the Pretoriens are known more for their strength and stability than their fleetness of foot. This has been particularly driven home for us as we’ve closely followed the adventures of Pretorien owners Carol and Livia as they make their way across the great expanse of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. They’ll be glad if they catch a blow, I’m sure, but blows are the exception rather than the rule. We’d like something with a little more get-up-and-go to it.

Layout
The interior is pretty much the same as every other interior, which is to say, nothing to write home about. The aft cabin is no more than serviceable, the large table along the centerline is obstructive, the head is well-forward and there is no dedicated wet locker. It’s small, but then there is quite a bit of storage and you have to pick one or the other in a 36ish foot vessel. The absence of an interior liner is unusual in our spectrum of potential purchases, and is a plus for accessibility and maintenance. Still, the interior didn’t exactly set our hearts afire.

Storage
The boat has a lot of good storage, including a deep but accessible cockpit locker. The icebox looked a little small but that’s typical of the era.

Compromises
The Pretorien may be the most well-rounded boat we have looked at yet, which is no surprise considering her reputation as a reliable, but affordable, world cruiser.

C&C yacht owners have a certain reputation for fanaticism about the brand that would probably allow the company to get away with calling itself whatever it wanted. That reputation was slightly intimidating when we first took a look at one last year. An older 38 (which is still on the market… at almost the same price), the owner was enthusiastic to the point that we thought he might change his mind about the sale right in the middle of the showing. Whether it was the low expectations we held for the interior space of what was primarily reputed to be a racing sailboat or the infectious zeal of the owner, we came away pleasantly surprised.

Our budget has gone up since then and the age range has gone down a bit, but we were more prepared to look at C&Cs again after we sold our boat and started the final push to find a replacement.

The big concern we had originally was the deep draft. We want something that sails well on the wind, sure, but does it really have to be that well? Seven feet of keel gets you to the point where certain popular anchorages start to become dicey and distance from shore in others becomes extreme. But we have managed to talk ourselves out of that objection for now. Also, one of the candidate C&Cs on our list is the Landfall 38; not a proper racer at all, but a dedicated cruiser, it primarily came in shoal draft version that drew 4’11″.

The other big strike you hear about C&Cs is the cored hull. Not many other popular brands have this feature, which provides additional strength and stiffness without adding weight, a fine thing in a performance sailboat. One reason hardly anyone else does it is that it is difficult to do well and the consequences can be traumatic. Many sailors are familiar with the perils of rotten coring in decks; imagine the same situation below the waterline and you have some idea why folks get a little hinky when the subject comes up. I’ve never seen this fact remarked upon in the sailing press, however, without the attached caveat “…but I’ve never seen one with problems.” Apparently C&C did it right. That doesn’t mean the owners continued to coddle them as necessary, however, and I still get cold sweats thinking about a leaky thru-hull or toe-rail missed at survey.

The current object of our affections is the C&C 37+, also known as the C&C 37/40 XL, or the C&C 37/40+, closely related to the C&C 37/40 R, or just the plain old C&C 37R. We’ve never seen a forty-foot boat with as many misleading names. A last hurrah from the company after it went into receivership and before it was finally purchased by Tartan in the late nineties, not many were built and the line was ultimately rather unsuccessful.

But as per expectations, the hardware is beefy and the performance is reputed to be good. Better yet, the interior has good storage, a voluminous head (adjacent to the companionway ladder) with a separate shower, and an utterly decadent master berth beneath the cockpit. You pay for that with a reduction in cockpit storage; her little sister, the 34+ (don’t get me started on the names again; it’s 36 feet, and also on our list) has a terrific cockpit locker that would have been nice to see in the larger version.

Possibly because there wasn’t a huge production run, there are not a lot of sources of information on the boat, even on the normally voluble C&C owner’s mailing list. Some owners seem to love them, others have complained of poor workmanship and quality problems.

The model seems to meet most of our criteria, although the draft still gives us some pause. They did make a wing keel version, and there are one or two of those on the market, but they are on the East coast. The two available locally have the standard 7’3″ bulb on the bottom. One of them has been defiled by the installation of in-mast furling, which for our purposes would probably have to be removed and replaced at some point. At the right price, we could work around those issues; a vicious and thorough survey might lay to rest questions of build quality and hull compromise.

There is a 34+ also on the market locally, but at the same price as the larger version, it seems silly to give up four feet of space, no matter how shiny she is.

I would like to take a look at a Landfall 38, but there are none for sale nearby currently. Mandy got a chance to look at one on a recent trip to Florida but all I can get her to say about it is, “It was weird,” so I probably need to take a look in person to pass judgement.

Our scorecard on the 37+:

Performance
Based on a racing hull that has been fairly successful locally and nationally, we think this shouldn’t be a problem. The additional weight introduced by cruising equipment and stores may degrade slightly from the top-end potential but even compromised we imagine better performance than a dedicated cruiser of this length.

Layout
The aft cabin is perfect for privacy and provides a space where a workable desk space could be introduced for my business. Mandy likes the galley layout and large hanging lockers. The nav station is more or less worthless, but we can probably do something with it. The common U-shaped settee wrapped around the fixed table is not totally our cup of tea but it’s not as wasteful as some are. And we’re pretty happy about the head location (wet locker!) and layout.

Storage
This is fair to good. There are a lot of secure and divided compartments with attractive cabinetry, and probably a sufficient number of larger spaces for bulky items. It could use much better cockpit or deck storage (I neglected to check the chain locker entirely) but you can’t have that and a huge aft cabin on a forty foot boat.

Compromises
A lot of lead that goes way down. Cored hull necessitates constant vigilance for rot problems. Tiny holding tank, without a clear location to augment it. The good light air performance also means she would probably need to be reefed early and often in variable winds, leading to workload problems. Some folks suggest they have control problems running downwind, although others claim to not have had any issues.

We had thought, though, that perhaps this was something we had brought on ourselves… some scent we had given off that brokers could smell and which somehow told them, “These people still haven’t sold their last boat yet… they’re not going to buy from you right now!” Or maybe we were too pushy, wanting to look at chain plates and engine mounts and keel bolts and asking uncomfortable questions about the provenance of streaks beneath hatches and portlights. Maybe they had plenty of easier customers lined up and we were just a waste of time to deal with at the time.

Those theories have mostly evaporated for us now. We’re still pushy and ask uncomfortable questions, but a lot of these boats obviously don’t have other buyers lining up for them because they’ve been on the market for months and months, and now we’ve got a pile of cash sitting around waiting to shower on some receptive buyer. But we still can’t get people to show us the boats!

Yesterday was a beautiful day to show a sailboat: sunny, breezy, not freezing (finally), a fine day for prospective buyers to be imagining themselves out behind the wheel of a gorgeous new sailboat. Mandy and I planned to spend the whole day hopping around looking at boats all along the northern Puget Sound.

In the end, we looked at one boat. Three different brokers, representing another five boats between them, just never got back to us. I had called earlier in the week to set up appointments. I spoke personally to two brokers, one of which I set the appointment with on the boat we actually did look at (although he got the time wrong by an hour), the other of who agreed to send me location and access information via e-mail but never did. The others just never called.

I would write this off to a bad streak of luck if it weren’t so consistent with our broker experiences. We have met exactly two brokers in the past year who have actually followed up with us, put any effort into answering our questions, or shown any sort of interest in getting the boats they are showing into presentable condition. The rest have been varying degrees of disinterested.

Something we consistently ask for after viewing any boat and leaving our contact information is for the broker to let us know if anything new pops up on their radar in the size/price/feature range we are looking for. But no one has ever bothered; finding out about new listings, even from brokers we have spoken with at length, is like pulling teeth. Perhaps there is some marketing technique that involves keeping your products secret that we are unaware of; if so, local yacht brokers are masters of the approach.

This can go so far as physically removing vessels to be viewed from their berths. We managed to get hold of one broker earlier in the week to take a look at one of our candidate boats. He told me where it was, and asked that I call back the next day to confirm. I did, and he asked me to call back again the day of the viewing to confirm. I did, and he seemed surprised. He told us again where the boat was but that he didn’t yet know how to get into it, but that we should meet him there and he’d figure it out.

Ten minutes later, he called back. “Yeah, it’s not at that marina anymore,” he said.

So we drove across town to meet him at the new marina it had been moved to, and then walked up and down the docks trying to find it. We did, eventually, by squinting hard enough to make out the vessel name through the thick patina of algae and grime that was covering it. It looked like it had only recently been raised from the sea floor. But we’d driven a long way and a little cleaning doesn’t bother us if the bones are solid, so we shrugged and started to climb aboard.

“Hello?” we heard a faint voice from inside. “Is someone there?”

The owner, apparently, had rented the boat out and neglected to inform the broker there was a liveaboard, and neglected to inform the liveaboard that his home was for sale. Nonetheless, he was extremely good-natured about the intrusion and helpfully showed us around.

Afterward, the broker told us, “I’m surprised you bothered to go aboard after seeing the outside!” Like most brokers, he blamed the owner. Another broker later told us he didn’t understand why owners wouldn’t spend a few hundred bucks cleaning a boat up so it would sell. There is certainly a good point there, but on the other hand, we find ourselves asking why a broker who stands to make ten percent of the sale wouldn’t do the same. It seems like they would have a compelling financial interest in doing so; if their stake in an individual vessel isn’t as large as that of the buyer, the percentage of their total income the sale represents is surely larger.

As far as we can tell, brokers exist primarily to enter typos into Yachtworld listings, avoid taking phone calls, write down appointments incorrectly, and go to lunch. Frankly, it seems like a pretty cushy job, and Mandy and I are putting some consideration into opening our own brokerage now. We even think we have figured out how you can still make money running a business like that: the customers are all nuts.

This makes more sense the more we think about it. At a recent gathering, a fellow sailor advanced the theory that all of us boaters are simply bat-shit crazy. “It’s not like we haven’t heard all the warnings,” he said. “We’ve all got stacks of books this thick with horror stories from everyone else who has ever owned a boat about everything that can go wrong. But six months later, after shelling our our life savings for one, we’ll be sitting there in a bar ourselves saying, ‘No shit, there I was….’” And he was right; we’re going to go spend a completely unreasonable amount of money on some leaky scow that will take that much again to simply own and operate, causing us considerable indigestion and sleepless nights along the way.

I think you can apply that same basic theory to just about anyone or anything nautical. So that explains why we’re going to go throw our money away on a new boat despite the brokers’ best efforts to prevent it, and it explains why we keep hearing that marina operators are supremely worried that they can’t keep their slips filled yet we just got a rate notice increase from them, and it explains why brokers themselves who stand to make ten or twenty grand on a boat sale won’t return the calls of folks with money burning a hole in their pocket or lift a finger to clean up an otherwise serviceable vessel.

I guess it all just works to keep life interesting.

Instead, it was last week. Becoming suddenly homeless has a wonderful way of concentrating the mind, so our desultory poking about among yacht listings and occasional capricious viewing of boats for sale has transformed into a highly-focused, militantly-organized, ruthless scouring of the local sailboat market.

I’ve found looking for a new boat to be considerably more challenging than any other big purchase I have ever made. There are fewer on the market in the first place compared to, say, houses or cars, and when you really start looking at what is available in a given range of sizes, you realize that there are fewer options yet. It’s a truism that every boat is a compromise, a living space carved into a shell dictated by a harsh and unforgiving environment.

There are a limited set of characteristics that sailboat designers can work with, and most of them have settled for riffing on the same basic themes. They all make the same sets of trade-offs. I don’t know if this was purely market driven or simply a failure of the imagination, but boats that have the particular set of trade-offs that we are looking for are few and far between. It’s as if every car ever made were basically a van, a sports car, or a station wagon. Very few builders seem to have covered the middle ground we are interested in.

What are we looking for? I guess I would describe it as a performance cruiser in the 36 to 40 foot range with sensible storage and layout. Our budget is modest, as these things go, but let’s say it has us looking at twenty-to-forty year old hulls for the most part.

As we’ve been looking, it’s become clear that maintenance is a far greater factor than age. But it’s unusual to find boats that old that haven’t had more than one owner, and with every additional owner comes the possibility that someone was less than diligent with upkeep. For the right price, we’re prepared to accept a certain amount of disrepair, although we’re also mindful of the fact that the neglect you can see often pales next to the neglect you can’t see… a few minor fiberglass blemishes on the bow of one recent candidate led to a whole pitiful story of woe and abandonment that put the risk premium through the roof for that particular boat.

Those are the sorts of things we can price in on an offer. What you can’t negotiate your way around is the basic design and build quality. These are the basic characteristics we are looking for:

Performance
We like to sail. We like to sail a lot. We often find ourselves ticking along at some small fraction of a knot when everyone else has long since done the sensible thing and dropped sail to motor past giving us funny looks and sometimes rude gestures. We also have bought into some of the new schools of thought on cruising, which basically say that light air is a more common challenge on passage than heavy seas, and that while modern forecasting and communications are not a bullet-proof method of storm avoidance, they do reduce the risks of encountering dangerous situations considerably over years past. Speed and accurate decision-support are the new full keel.

And, particularly for as long as we stick around the Pacific Northwest, pointing is important. Our north/south oriented bodies of water align directly with the most prevalent winds, which means you are nearly always heading directly upwind or downwind. A bathtub with a pillow case can go downwind, but working to windward with any sort of efficiency takes something that can go close-hauled.

Layout
It is unquestionably challenging to design an interior that is safe and comfortable while underway but is adequate and airy enough for real life. Mandy and I both run our own businesses and we both primarily (and necessarily, when sailing far from the city) work from home. We both need space to work; in fact, the lack of reasonable work space is the primary reason we sold our old boat. Understandably, very few designers put much emphasis on this sort of interior space. In fact, the trend is in the opposite direction, with electronic charting creating an excuse to move down to postage-stamp sized nav desks, and the all-important berth count mandating awkward aft cabins and unwieldy cabin tables. A nice compromise between open and useful that we appreciated on our old boat was a fold-away table in the main cabin. These seem to be the exception rather than the rule, however.

We also really like having the head aft of the main cabin. How it is that other people make do in the Pacific Northwest sailing without a wet locker or similar near the companionway is beyond us. Not tracking water all through the cabin has been a huge bonus for comfort on our current boat. It’s also nice, in rough seas, to be able to duck in for a head call right at the bottom of the ladder (and nearer the center of motion) instead of struggling forward to the nausea-inducing bow. There’s also a certain ick factor avoided by keeping the holding tank and any potentially leaky hoses a goodly distance away from where one sleeps.

Storage
In that quest for more spacious layouts, a lot of designers really sacrificed storage space. We were surprised when we were looking at boats five and six feet longer than ours that had less effective storage space. The large aft staterooms eat away at the cockpit storage that has served us as a garage these past years. The quest for broad interiors leaves only nooks and crannies for stowage, eliminating some of the big spaces such as we were able to use for tool boxes, spare life vests, and other bulky items. We could fit our entire deflated dinghy and a spare, and all pumps, patches, and oars for both in one of the compartments beneath our v-berth. We are very much looking for some vessel that approximates this amount of accessible storage space.

Compromises
The tradeoffs we are willing to make for these requirements? Well, we figure we’re going to have to sacrifice some stability, seakindliness, and manageability, for starters. Boats that go fast from the era we are looking at tended to follow the much-maligned IOR standard, which we are given to understand can be a handful in a blow. We are probably looking at reduced tankage compared to traditional cruising boats. We’ll give up some safety factors in accepting a partial skeg or spade rudder, which are more susceptible to damage. We’ll give up some anchorages and passes that won’t accomodate the deeper keel that we’ll need for the windward performance. We’ll end up paying more for the interior layout than we might if we were to go with the more traditional, and more widely available, designs from that era. Since we’re looking at production boats, maintenance and hull access are going to be problems (although large and active owner communities are a benefit for these things).

There are probably other compromises that we aren’t even aware we are making yet; our experiences with our last boat have told us a lot about what we think we want, but we can’t pretend that those are universal experiences. I expect we’ll find that we have traded away some things that we haven’t even been aware of yet. And of course it’s entirely possible that we will end up compromising on our compromises… we’re restricted by what’s out there, none of which is exactly what we might draw if we were commissioning a boat from scratch.

I don’t mean to whine; in fact, it’s a pretty good market for buyers right now, and we are finding stuff out there to get excited about. A lot of Perry designs fit this bill to greater or lesser extent; a few of Rob Ball’s C&C designs, while imbued with other drawbacks (getting into Tsehum Harbour was nervewracking enough without seven odd feet of lead hanging under us), have been surprisingly thoughtfully designed as cruisers despite their racing pedigrees. And we think there are some Ericsons that would probably work out nicely for us.

So that’s where we’re starting from. I expect that we will be disabused of our more fantastic notions and hardened by the realities of the used boat market as the search progresses… watch it unfold here live!

This has been home for the last three years, a home that has, of necessity, demanded greater intimacy and labor than most homes, so it makes sense that this should be a significant event of some sort in our lives. But it’s going to happen so fast that it’s hard to put it into any sort of perspective. We’ve been in a whirlwind of paperwork, apartment-browsing, boat-browsing, storage-finding, packing, preparing, and planning, and we’re so exhausted at the end of the day it’s impossible to think about it all rationally. This may be true of any move, but moving out of a house takes time… sorting, packing, hauling, closing, it’s all weeks or even months to work through things. We’ll be done here in about three days.

Last night, when we sat down and thought about it, we figured we can probably get everything we have on board into one small pick-up. People keep offering to help us move, which is lovely of them, but I just have these visions of everyone I know coming over, picking up one item, carrying it to the truck, and then being handed their obligatory slice of pizza and thanked for their assistance.

We are switching our seat from the selling side of the table exclusively to the buying side now and putting the boat search into high gear. A broker we spoke to yesterday pointed out something that we had suspected, that there are sort of a dearth of good cruising yachts in our prospective size range around Puget Sound. Despite this, we have found a couple of decent candidates, and we’re having to force ourselves to slow down a bit and consider all the implications. Three days is no kind of time frame to decide on a vessel you hope to last you a decade or more.

One of my favorite series on Three Sheets, the website, was from the early days, right as the site was starting up, where Deborah and Marty chronicled their search for what would become Three Sheets, their boat. I’m always fascinated by what factors different people consider important when they are looking at boats. It has been enlightening to see all those considerations at play from the seller’s perspective. Now, as we are firmly settled on the buyer’s side of the table, I thought I might continue that excellent Three Sheets tradition and take you all along as we look for our new boat. Stay tuned!

Mandy and I had been watching the house and minding the chickens for a couple weeks at that point, long enough to have soaked the cold of January’s snows out of our systems, and long enough that I had become used to the pre-dawn view of Port Townsend across the water, lights twinkling in the distance. That morning, as I looked blearily out to the north, I recoiled and did a double-take: a huge, sharply-contoured shadow was shifting subtly and ominously and right there outside the front windows.

The First Glimpse

I had first woken at 5 a.m. to a shrieking gust of wind, and had rolled over and gone back to sleep, fuzzily thinking that there hadn’t been any advisories for high winds the night before. Northwesterlies claim their share of victims every year up here.

But this late in the season, there is little damage left to be done by sputtering spring wind storms, and the most I expected to see was the usual random detritus blown down the bay on white-frothed rollers.

As soon as I realized that it was a boat ashore in front of the house and not some briny sea monster rising from the waves to attack, I also instantly knew which boat it was. Lotus was the only vessel that size left in the anchorage. A big, boxy 92-footer laid down in 1908 and launched the following year, Lotus was at the time the largest cruising yacht on the West Coast.

More recently, she was put into a trust and has been a fixture at wooden boat shows around the region, and a delightful reminder of a bygone era of luxury cruising along the Inside Passage as she has entertained at her mooring or ventured out on tours. Any time I look out across the bay at her, I expect to see gay yellow lights arraying her broad upper deck and elegant ladies with parasols being helped down into gleaming skiffs to be taken ashore after an evening of entertainment aboard.

Now, I was seeing a vessel that gave every indication that it was about to be pounded apart against the concrete ramp on the point in front of the house.

I stumbled back to the bedroom to grab clothes and a coat and wake my wife. I doubted there was anyone aboard but wanted to be ready in case there was and they needed to come off. I didn’t know who owned her; I hoped that some of the neighbors did and suspected some other early riser might already have called. Still, I needed to let someone know; after my utterly fruitless experiences with the Coast Guard during previous storms, I opted for 911.

They were pleasant, but completely out of the water, as it were, when it came to nautical matters. Big vessels have big fuel tanks, but for better or for worse, the policy seems to be more about vengeance than prevention in the event of a spill. In any event, the only official response was a state boat that came around 24 hours later to take water samples.

Further down the beach, a neighbor who knows the director of the foundation who owns her gave her a call. In years past, Christian Gruye’s dinghy has washed up on the beach nearby. When she called back, she assumed that was the case again. “No, this time it’s the big boat,” he told her, setting in motion a frenzied salvage effort.

But for the first hour, as the tide receded, it was only my wife Mandy and I and a slightly asthmatic dachsund named Daffy we were taking care of, watching Lotus’ roll period increase as the wind pushed her and less and less water remained below to keep her upright. Around 0700, she went over on her port side. We could hear the crashing as everything not bolted down or braced let go and ended up against the port side. Fortunately, none of the windows were smashed out; equally fortunately, she lay down heeled to seaward, and didn’t come down with her superstructure in the trees and logs and the concrete ramp to shoreward.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Shortly afterward, the first rescuers began to find their way down the various driveways fronting the beach. Eric, an engineer, and Brad, a shipwright intimate with her structure, were among the first. I searched out the oars to the house dinghy and helped them launch into the heaving waves so they could get aboard and check the damage. The first reports were encouraging; a mess inside, but not making much water. No electrical, so no pumps.

She began pounding then, as the waves built and her buoyancy failed, but there was little to be done about it. Vessel Assist boats from Port Hadlock and Port Townsend arrived, and there was a discussion down on the beach, the first of many that would occur throughout the day, about getting a kedge out. Christian and her husband, Brion, and another friend, Suzie, showed up. A council was called; we put on coffee, and volunteers congregated in the living room to review the situation and discuss the options.

Too Close for Comfort

These were limited. iPhones were produced, tide tables and forecasts were consulted. Depending on whose phone and which app you looked at, the wind was either going to increase or decrease, continue or abate, at some point in the late morning or late evening or perhaps the next day altogether.

The tide tables were more closely in agreement with one another and were uniformly pessimistic: the tide she had come in on that morning was the highest for the next month. The afternoon high would be more than a foot lower; the next highest high would be around 0530 the next morning but would still be lower than the one she grounded on.

Hope that she could come off on the afternoon high faded rapidly as the wind continued to pick up, and options for lightening her receded … no one wanted to try to get the 350-pound main anchor off the bow in such conditions, and when someone broached the idea of off-loading fuel in the heavy swells I broke out in a cold sweat.

The kedge conversation happened again. Costs and benefits of using Vessel Assist versus a private vessel were debated. Someone brought up the idea of calling the Elmore, an old tug that had fared poorly in last year’s storms. She had been repaired and was moored nearby and had plenty of power, but I knew her transmission had been acting up recently, and tied onto a grounded vessel while working off a lee shore is no place to not be able to shift into forward.

All Aboard

It became clear at last that little was going to be decided so early. While she was still partially submerged, there was no way of accounting for damage to the hull; a hole below the water line might well mean she was better left where she lay than towed into deeper water, at least until a patch could be fashioned. Preparations could be made for de-watering, rigging a towing bridle, and making emergency patches.

While time and tide may wait for no man, the reverse is not true: it turns out that men and women are pretty much stuck waiting on wind and tide … no one who has been through a hard grounding in a broad tidal range can easily understand how little action there is versus how much waiting must be done. We brewed more coffee and made more sandwiches and people brought pizza and waited.

When the tide dropped enough, someone brought in a ladder and we rigged it at the bow on the shoreward side to allow easier access. Going aboard was every bit as surreal as seeing her for the first time heaving out there in the dark. She was canted at 45 degrees, so nothing about boarding her and moving about was in the least bit normal. After ascending the ladder and clambering over the rail, you clapped on to a line lead across the foredeck to a short ladder up to the upper deck. A hatch cover was the only footing until you reached the ladder, which you then ascended sideways, grabbing at the upper deck railing along the way. Once in front of the pilothouse, you grabbed another rope and pulled yourself up to the high side, where you could finally lean against the pilothouse and catch your breath for a minute. After that, you tried to scrape sand off your boots and keep your footing on the non-skid, holding onto the rail or a safety line that was later rigged leading aft to the entrance into the cabin.

Inside the cabin was even worse. Appliances, cabinets, dishes, tools, equipment of every type and description, all had come loose and lay piled against the port bulkhead. Footing was precarious and every handhold bore examination as loose joinery was ready to give way when weight was applied. The carnival funhouse angle induced vertigo and made some folks nauseous. “I didn’t think I was going to need Dramamine on a grounded boat,” one guy quipped.

As the morning progressed, more people started to show up. Uncertain about the condition of the hull and the need for manpower to ready her for towing, Christian called in friends from the crew of the Adventuress, currently hauled out in Port Townsend. Students and staff from the Northwest School of Wooden BoatBuilding, who had a fine view of the proceedings from their building across the bay, came to help. One student, a fellow named Greg, happened to be renting the guest house on the property we were taking care of; he opened up his bungalow as freely as we had the main house and worked tirelessly to help out. Vessel Assist put in at Port Hadlock marina, just down the beach, and came over with pumps and equipment. Daffy was confused, and then, when the pizza showed up and kind-hearted volunteers started sneaking her table scraps, thrilled by all the excitement.

But as the tide began to rise, the wind continued to scream down the bay, and Lotus began taking on water. We had already hoisted several electric pumps aboard and a generator; now, I rushed to get another generator aboard before the waves blocked off the ladder again. I filled my boots and a wave sprayed the generator with salt water. Wiser men, Brion and Brad, set up a tagline to ferry more pumps and fuel across safely. We ran an extension cord from the house to the boat, first across the beach, then overhead as the tide rolled in. Later, we added a second cord on another circuit. I lost count of how many pumps went aboard. But they could not keep up with the water, and Eric and Suzie on board could not find where it was coming in. I worried that she had come down on a rock, piercing the hull out of sight of the beach and inaccessible from the interior.

But once it had become clear that there was no pumping her out and no righting her on the afternoon high tide, there was a sudden sense of focus. To the extent she was coming slightly afloat, she was simply getting pounded by the heavy surf, driven into the sand and against the sandstone shelf where she lay; better to let her flood and keep her stable, and to know that everything rested on the chance at the 2300 low tide to get her patched and ready to come off on the next morning’s high.

There was a period of calm, then, in the afternoon. Eric and Suzie stayed aboard to man the pumps and stabilize her. The mooring ball was still attached at the bow and a long length of chain disappeared back toward her original mooring; a plan was devised to retrieve the ball and chain to avoid further entanglements when she came off. Christian and Brion finalized arrangements with Vessel Assist; they would be on station at 0400 with three vessels, including the 50-foot Cascade, ready to pass a line and pull.

There was time to chat; Christian, who had inherited the boat from her father, regaled us with all the other adventures they had been through as she was growing up on the vessel, frightening scrapes in storms, previous groundings, sales and re-purchases. Lotus, it became clear, wasn’t simply a historic vessel with a storied past; she was part of the family. Every decision Christian was making that day involved soul-searching with a raft of memories attached.

Taking advantage of the lull, I reconfigured the electrical cabling and set up floodlights I found in the shop to illuminate the beach, ramp and ladder. Patching supplies and additional pumps and tools began to show up and were stacked on the ramp, waiting for low tide. A supply of headlamps, batteries, and waders materialized. Darkness fell, and the hull finally stopped pounding as the tide receded again.

As soon as it was practical to get at her port side without filling our boots, we were looking for the hole. Several of the Adventuress crew, some of them previous graduates of the Boat School, duckwalked awkwardly along in the surging surf, minutely inspecting every seam and butt that wasn’t obscured in the sand. Although I don’t know the first thing about wooden boats, I joined them and made my own survey.

We rendezvoused on the beach at the bow and compared notes, mostly favorable. One woman found a seam that she thought might have lost the caulking; another spied a suspicious butt that seemed sprung. I’d found a spongy patch above the sponson where the plywood seemed to have sprung out. “But that’s above the waterline,” someone said. “Not today, it wasn’t!” I replied.

We walked back to take another look and show one another our findings. Although she had been taking on gallons and gallons of water, far more than the pumps could keep up with, nothing we had spotted seemed likely to have been the source. We crouched along the port quarter, squinting down at the drips coming from the butt, debating the likelihood of the waves leaking in behind the guard, while a few feet further aft, a gaping hole in the guard that we had all missed on our first two passes yawned over our heads. In the movie version, I could imagine the camera panning up from our debate and focusing on that obvious gap, bashed in by the afternoon waves.

Of course, sharper eyes soon found the damage. That entire section of the guard had been the suspect all along; while the rest of the hull above the sponsons was heavily timbered, financial considerations had forced a cosmetic patch with plywood in that particular area. As luck would have it, it was slated for more permanent repair later this summer. But for now, it was going to get more plywood and battened tarps.

A human centipede of volunteers conveyed boards, tools and tarps over the beach and floodlights were set up to illuminate the area. Another neighbor from down the beach, CJ, who had a long career in commercial salvage down in the Gulf, appeared with his son Carlos and more buckets of tools and gear. The kedge conversation happened again. But the tide window was open: it was time to get her ready for the morning pull.

What followed was like an intensive, compressed master-work course in rigging and salvage from some of the most experienced nautical minds on the West Coast. My own repertoire consists of the usual recreational sailing knots, bowlines, figure eights, a few different modest hitches. These folks were tying exotic knots and indeed entire systems of knots with variants and sub-variants and as much complexity as the opening moves of grandmaster chess players. Unfortunately, their fingers moved too fast for me to follow any of it and it was no time for giving lessons. Brion was kind enough to attempt to explain his bridle rig off the stern post, but the various yippees and whoopies and whatnot went right over my head, although the Boat School students in attendance ate it all up.

Neither am I much of a carpenter, but I dug in and helped roll battens into tarps and pound them into the hull and sponson, and found myself hammering nails inexpertly into plywood sheets to make a sandwich over the hole and other vulnerable areas.

Toward the stern, in a feat of endurance and strength, several people had crawled in under the hull and were using sledgehammers to bust apart two large rocks that threatened to hang up the rudder or keel if she were dragged that direction in the morning.

Brad and CJ supervised the patch work. When they were satisfied, we piled most of the remaining salvage material aboard, tucking it away in the jumbled galley off the after-deck, where it promptly got lost amidst the other debris covering the sole. CJ warned us to get our heads down for a few hours and get some sleep. But part of the battle was to be fought that night, as the tide came in … if the patch didn’t hold and the pumps couldn’t keep up again, she would have too much weight to come upright and off the bottom at high tide. Eric and Brad settled in for a long night in the dark, canted vessel. The rest of us trudged back up the ramp to get a couple hours of rest.

I counted myself fortunate to have a bed; everyone else was relegated to couches or the floor in the main house and Greg’s bungalow, or, in Brion’s case, to his car. “He sleeps great in there,” Christian said dismissively as she claimed the living room couch.

I was up at 0330. I had gotten a couple hours sleep but woke up around three and finally couldn’t take the strain of laying there without knowing if she was coming upright with the tide or not. I threw on my wet, dirty clothes and headed outside. It was frigid; I looked up and the stars shone clear and bright overhead. A spotlight was crawling south from Port Townsend. Initially I thought it was, finally, the Coast Guard, who had made some vague noises about being present for the pull, but in fact it was the Cascade coming in. The two smaller Vessel Assist boats, Gabriel and Negotiator, were putting out from Hadlock, their own lights flashing eerily in the dark.

Vessel Assist Arrives

When I got down to the ramp, Greg was already industriously ferrying people and equipment back in forth in the dinghy. The tide was already over the base of the ladder, and they were hauling it aboard. To my immense relief, it was dead calm out, and Lotus was beginning to come upright on the tide.

Vessel Assist put a couple crew aboard, and Brion, Eric, and Suzie were joined there by some of the Adventuress crew, including one of her captains, Joshua Berger. Josh went aboard by dinghy and stopped off briefly on the ramp. He’d brought fresh poppyseed muffins. In addition to being, by all accounts, a superlative captain, he also bakes a mean muffin.

On board, they had a quick safety meeting, and with a little yelling back and forth we coordinated disconnecting and retrieving the tagline and the electrical cords that were connecting her to shore. One of the two smaller Vessel Assist craft ran in the main tow line from Cascade and they connected her to the bridle rigged from the stern. Gabriel took a second line to the bow to assist. At around 0445, they took a strain and started gently pulling.

I stood on the ramp with Christian and watched as the Cascade put on more and more power. Lotus rolled to port, but didn’t budge. The process was repeated, then again, then again in tandem with Gabriel hauling on the bow, and each time the top rail on Lotus dipped out toward the water, I could feel Christian tensing up a bit more.

Finally, I turned to her and said, “Are you sure you want to watch this?” She turned, looked at me for a beat, and said, “No!” then marched directly up to the house and parked herself in a back room, where she sat waiting for news in a state of private torment which I could not even begin to imagine.

For 45 minutes, they rocked Lotus back and forth on the sandstone shelf where she lay, with only one very slight bit of movement. Cascade and Gabriel, pulling in tandem, weren’t making any headway at all, and despite all the considerable discussion beforehand and the clear safety protocols that had been set up to maintain her structural integrity, I was worrying they were going to break or spring something. And indeed, as they switched the bridle to the bow and took up strain there, Brion yelled out to stop–the capstan had begun to shift on its mount. They slacked off, inspected it, then took a strain again more slowly. It held. But still the hull would not budge.

As high tide passed, I was sure it was done … she was not going to come off, and the storms predicted for the coming week would surely beat her to pieces there without extraordinary measures … a crane, perhaps, or a thorough gutting to lighten her enough to come up on a lower tide. None of the options would be cheap or pretty. You could hear in their voices on the radio that after another few pulls, the Vessel Assist captains were getting ready to come to the same conclusion.

Then, on a surge with both boats pulling, the bow shifted a couple feet out.

Instantly, hope returned. “We’ve got movement on the bow!” Lotus called out dramatically on the radio. “Lotus is coming off.”

With slow majesty and accompanied by loud cheers rising over the rumble of diesels in the pre-dawn murk, she came free and headed for deeper water.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Her rudder hit something as the stern dragged off and shifted a few degrees starboard, causing her to tow oddly and Negotiator nearly got caught in the tow line. They halted the tow and let her drift a bit while they inspected for damage below, got the steering gear straightened out, and rigged for a hip tow for the five-mile stretch up to Boat Haven in Port Townsend.

Back in the house, Christian was shaking, Mandy was smiling and Daffy was still asleep. It seemed very empty, suddenly, with everyone gone and no huge boat sitting out front. Christian thanked us graciously for the hospitality (I find it’s easy to be hospitable when it’s someone else’s house) and headed for Port Townsend to meet Lotus when she came in. Mandy and I listened to the radio traffic as she made the slow, hour-long transit north, gathered up the odd bits and pieces of gear left around and ate cold pizza in celebration.

And now, the real work begins. Lotus was both amazingly lucky in where she came in, and very fortunate in her friends. The expertise and dedication that materialized around her were what saved her, from Brion’s rigging knowledge to Brad’s familiarity with her structure to Eric’s knowledge of her systems (it was he who pumped free the water tank forward that lightened her bow up enough to slide off despite being several feet higher ashore than the stern) and the general but deep expertise of the Adventuress captain and crew in all matters nautical.

In retrospect, it is even more impressive. Not only did everything that needed to happen, happen, but it was done safely and in a seamanlike manner without argument or yelling. The only amateur out there was me; and even that was not without value, since none of the other luminaries out there had probably ever been so lubberly as to have grounded and flooded a boat before, whereas I had. So even my lack of expertise resulted in the availability of some hard-won experience, which I hope was not utterly worthless.

Part of that experience is the knowledge that getting the boat off, as difficult as that may be, is actually the easier part of a salvage job. Putting her back together again is the long, arduous, unromantic part that grinds against your soul and forces you to question your dedication to boat ownership. And particularly with a wooden vessel of Lotus’ age, without insurance, it’s sure to be an expensive proposition.

So, I urge you to stop by the foundation’s web page when you are done reading this and make a contribution. Someday soon again I hope to look out and imagine those elegant ladies and their parasols enjoying a sunny day on Puget Sound aboard the Lotus.