Magneto, et al, first let me wish all of you a VERY Happy New Year and new decade! Sorry to have not been able to join in sooner but Wow! what a great way to start my first day of 2020 with this read.
Not sure I have much to add to the many other great comments from some of the truly great TF contributors who have already added their sage advise but perhaps I can add a few other perspectives that would seem relative to your OP Magneto and to many of the other topics touched on here already. I do suffer from a severe case of neverasentencewhenaparagraphwilldo syndrome or as some friends refer to it I am “brevity challenged” but I will do my best to keep this as short as possible.
Having just read through what I find to be one of the best TF threads I’ve read in some time I will go back and respond separately to a few of the other comments in this thread which referenced me and the new XPM78-01 mv Möbius which my wife and I are building here in Antalya Turkey with Naval Yachts. For those interested in our boat and the build project I maintain a blog at
Mobius.World with weekly progress updates on the design and build of our 24m/78’ all aluminium eXtreme eXploration Passage Maker so I won’t delve into that here. I will say that our priorities in designing and now building this boat are Safety, Efficiency, Comfort and Low Maintenance and we factor all four of these into most every decision we make.
To put my comments into perspective and better keep them in context let me start with a bit of info and background on my wife, myself, our cruising background and our current situation with the new boat we are now building. Christine and I are former single handed sailors until I left a comment on one of her blog postings which ignited a spectacular spiral of Emails, Skype calls and twitterpation. At the time Christine was on her sailboat in the Caribbean and I was on mine in Fiji so we decided to meet in person almost six years ago today and had our “first date” be a very eventful 3000nm sail from Fiji to Majuro. We figured that there were likely only two outcomes from such a first date; either one of us would throw the other off the boat on the passage or we’d never be single again. I’m delighted to let you know the latter happened and I can attest to the fact that finding true love in your mid 60’s is awemazing! We have now been married for five years and between us we have 3 children, 3 grandchildren and 2 dogs, all of whom we hope to soon be hosting on our new boat once we launch in the next few months.
Moving on to more pertinent and relevant information. While we have only done a few passages on power boats, which is perhaps the biggest reason for switching over to power now, we do have a reasonable amount of sailing experience with over 100k miles between us and Christine has had her 100 Ton Captains license since she was in her mid twenties. Fortunately for us we both LOVE long passages and have made more of them than we can count and done multiple crossings of every ocean except the Indian so far and intend to cross that and many more as soon as we are back out exploring this awesome planet’s waters again later this year.
Until we sold our previous boat, a 52’ Bruce Roberts designed steel sailboat and moved ashore here in Antalya to build our new boat our boats were our full time homes and we will move aboard Möbius shortly after we launch and pick up where we left off sailing the world. Our history and future intent is to most often be the only boat in the each bay we are in so we spend most of our time in extremely remote parts of the world be they uninhabited tropical islands or polar ice flows and have designed and built Möbius accordingly. Therefore over engineered, over built and overly redundant is our norm. We are almost always on anchor other than to be hauled out every few years for bottom paint or other larger maintenance items. We therefore set up all our boats for eXtreme self reliance and the assumption that we have no access to shore power or any other land based assistance.
As several others have mentioned here already speed does matter. Most importantly speed adds a significant safety factor to your passages. The ability to either get out of the way of bad weather or stay with the good or get where you are going sooner, dramatically increases the degree of safety of your boat. In our case, the ability to AVERAGE 10+ knots on multi week long passages and thus do 250 mile days does indeed “change everything” for us as this is double what we have averaged in our past decades of sailing AND is then multiplied by the MUCH larger weather windows when have in a power boat compared to sail. This speed therefore equally expands the range and number of experiences available for us to chose from.
Sounds like you are already reading and watching the other blogs and YouTube channels which have been mentioned here, as do we, and I would just add my vote to continue to do what you are already doing by reading and researching everything you can. As you’ve discovered TF and indeed the world is filled with incredible teachers, we just need to learn how to ask and to find them. It certainly confirms my long held belief that “When the learner is ready, the teacher will appear”. I called my previous boat “Learnativity” because I love learning and I thought that there would be lots of that if I were to go sailing around the world singlehanded. Trust me, she lived up to her name and I become a more voracious researcher and learner every day. I mention it here not only for its importance but to suggest that anyone who does NOT love the challenge of learning more about more things than ever imagined, then I’m not sure sailing the world, by sail or power, would be a good choice. Based on your comments and questions here already it is obvious you do love this type of learning and the resultant solutions you are able to come up with for each challenge as they come along and this bodes very well for the likelihood that you and your wife will take to living aboard and sailing the world like a duck to water.
A few final comments and recommendations I have to offer are:
Listen and learn from all the first hand expertise you have already received in this thread alone and others in TF and other venues BUT be sure that all the decisions you make are based on what is best for YOU as a couple and what fits you both the best. There is no such thing as the “best boat” until you complete the thought with “for me”. Even then it will only be “best for you” at a given point in time and until you decide to go after your next boat. Prior to even beginning the design process, Christine and I referred to this as Project Goldilocks, and still do, because our aim is to design and build the boat that is just right, just for us.
Do whatever you need to do to GO NOW. GO charter those boats on your short list. GO on passages or any amount of on the water experiences with anyone who will take you along. GO find and buy the boat that is calling your names the loudest. GO on that first passage and never look back. I’m in the camp that would advise you to buy the boat that you think fits you both the best NOW. If it turns out that after a few years on that boat you decide you want something else then cross that bridge when you get to it. I don’t recommend a “starter boat” and would second the others here who have recommended similarly that the amount of experience you will gain learning THAT boat will IMO, far outweigh any advantages of starting smaller and then having to unlearn and relearn a whole new boat in a few years.
We are down to the last few months before we launch this first XPM so we are close to being consumed 24/7 with the build and in the shipyard six days a week and home for the seventh just long enough to write those weekly blog posts so I don’t get much time for anything else these days. However, I will do my best to stay tuned into TF and this thread in particular and add any additional comments or answer any questions here that you or others may have.
If it would happen to fit your travel plans, I would also extend a sincere offer to you or anyone else here on TF to come for a visit to Naval Yachts in the Antalya Free Zone to see and inspect XPM78-01 Möbius for yourself. I’d be glad to make time to give you a guided tour and answer questions as to why we have designed and built the way we have. For those who have not been, Turkey is a truly wonderful country and her food, sights and people will exceed your expectations and would make this so much more than “just” a visit to see Project Goldilocks in person.
Lastly for now let me again thank you Magneto for starting this thread and thank all of you who have contributed to creating a thread that is so densely packed with hard earned knowledge and wisdom. If this is how my first day of 2020 begins I can’t wait for tomorrow and getting back to a life at sea as soon as possible.
Here is to making 2020 be the best year yet for us all.
-Wayne