Hello all you salty dogs. We are sailors with kids starting college in the coming years, now planning to spend part of the year living aboard to explore the Pacific NW. We've lived in Seattle and around Oregon for 25 years, learned our chops in the Puget Sound sailing and then bought a Catalina 30. After getting busy with older kids, we turned to Van life and trailer our Ranger 20 which has turned out to be more enjoyable than current fighting on the Columbia.
We are both bare boat captains and have chartered 40-45ft (mostly cats) in desirable tropical locations, and are now very interested in changing it up to a trawler. We have friends cruising in a Garcia 45 sailboat that are very much trying to change our minds as they tell us their stories from Ecuador to Hawaii and then Alaska in their alum hull.
However, we have a few chronic injuries and enough time on the water to realize our dreams of blue water passages aren't really that strong anymore.
In our summers in Puget Sound, we have motored every time we were up there sailing and just don't see the utility vs. a trawler for our needs in exploring up the inside passage and back. We hope to eventually leave Portland for the Port Townsend area as well.
We've always had an eye for the tugs (Ranger, Nordic) and Sedans. We just came across the Integrity 440, know a little about common builders such as Grand Banks, but not much. But we are jumping in here for your breadth of knowledge and experience because we have made mistakes enough in the past to know better than going it alone!
Appreciate your thoughts and advice!
M and R
We are both bare boat captains and have chartered 40-45ft (mostly cats) in desirable tropical locations, and are now very interested in changing it up to a trawler. We have friends cruising in a Garcia 45 sailboat that are very much trying to change our minds as they tell us their stories from Ecuador to Hawaii and then Alaska in their alum hull.
However, we have a few chronic injuries and enough time on the water to realize our dreams of blue water passages aren't really that strong anymore.
In our summers in Puget Sound, we have motored every time we were up there sailing and just don't see the utility vs. a trawler for our needs in exploring up the inside passage and back. We hope to eventually leave Portland for the Port Townsend area as well.
We've always had an eye for the tugs (Ranger, Nordic) and Sedans. We just came across the Integrity 440, know a little about common builders such as Grand Banks, but not much. But we are jumping in here for your breadth of knowledge and experience because we have made mistakes enough in the past to know better than going it alone!
Appreciate your thoughts and advice!
M and R