Boat Show ends

The boat show ends this weekend, under appropriately sunny skies. Our last day was Thursday, however, which wasn't quite so sunny, but was considerably less crowded and slower-paced than our first two days.

We went to the South Lake Union section first to take another longer look at the sailboats there with more opportunity to poke around in the nooks and crannies and more time to talk with the salespeople. We spent quite a bit of time chatting with one helpful gentleman from Discovery Yachts brokerage aboard a Regina of Vindo--Mandy loved the (uber-expensive) pilot-house boat but I thought our conversation with the broker was more useful... more information and better informed speculation than one might get in a year of surfing various Internet message boards. Goes to show you that you can't live life successfully entirely online, I suppose.

The Regina was not to my taste, although obviously well-built and well-appointed. It was only a 35, of course, which seems pretty small next to most of the boats there, but it seemed a little cramped even compared to our 33... probably due to more storage and tankage and a different, off-shore-oriented design philosophy.

Two 38 foot Bavarias there had caught our eye on Monday and I went aboard both for another look. I had done a little digging in the interim and found that they are pretty poorly regarded boats, seen as more expensive but in the same category as many of their American coastal cruiser counterparts. I had noticed some problems--puddles at the bottom of lockers, a segmented bilge without drainholes through stringers, and some other design defects. And like the American boats (Bavarias are built in Germany; you're more likely to see them in Europe than the west coast of the US) they weren't designed for heavy ocean-going work, without the host of small features you want to see in a boat that is going to take a beating from time to time. Apart from that, though, I couldn't find the construction and finishing defects that everyone online seemed to complain about. And they do seem better suited for off-shore work in some respects, with more tankage and some of the fittings one would expect on a beefier boat. It's an odd combination, I suppose, and I'm still ultimately not sure what to think. I was initially impressed by their CE Class A (Offshore) rating until I chatted with someone who had gone through the rating process and insisted it was a bureacratic joke. Still, for the money they seem to have better offshore features than their American counterparts in the same size range, and I imagine that even if it is mostly lipservice to the CE rating, that is why.

One of them was used, but it presented a currently unavailable center cockpit version, which I quite liked. Mandy wasn't impressed by either one, though, which I suppose is just as well. Something common to those and the other European boats was the inclusion of the head amidships or slightly aft, which I really like. Our Hunter has a similar arrangement and I can't imagine considering anything else for use in bouncy waters. It's a task to stand up forward of the mast when we're in heavy seas; trying to use the head would be a disaster. The easier motion toward the stern makes the necessary functions much easier. I am not sure why it has been left to the European designers (with a few notable exceptions) to come up with more practical modern accomodations, but that seems to be the trend.

Mandy was quite impressed by the Catalina 44DS, which practically has a basement in the bilge... but then, she's the one who doesn't want a boat bigger than 38 feet in the first place. The space is nice, but a floating condo isn't really what we're after.

At the end of the day, there wasn't really a lot down on the lake that impressed us. We did get some ideas on various features we like, though, which will probably be a help when it comes time to shop around for an upgrade.

After we were done at Lake Union, we took advantage of the free SLUT (South Lake Union Trolley for you non-locals... they changed the official name pretty quick when they realized the acronym it formed, but you can still buy "Ride the SLUT" T-shirts in a variety of venues in the South Lake Union area) tickets and grabbed the streetcar downtown for lunch. Then we hoofed it over to Qwest Field to catch the Man Overboard presention by Chuck Gould, editor of Nor'westing magazine.

This turned out to be a presentation we both liked. It was suitably generic to type and size of boat, even though Gould is primarily a power-boater, and suitably specific to the region and our climate. There were no flashy insights or silver bullets, but then none were expected. Gould gave a good talk and presented an effective framework for thinking about crew safety in terms of MOB accidents.

After all that, I feel like I should be out in the sunshine today working on Insegrevious. Since it's SuperBowl weekend, though, I'm at home instead, doing the work that I might instead have done tomorrow, had I not been going to a SuperBowl party instead. But it feels like spring is getting ready to burst out soon, and with it we'll have to find some time for sailing again.