T&T: cat vs mono, sail vs power, bayliner vs grand banks...

[Faure, Marin]

>A Camano able to make 13 knots can go from Seattle to the San Juan
islands in a single day of cruising. A Nordhavn can't. A cat might?

One way around the speed issue is to keep the boat close to the area you
want to cruise in.  Our old GB36 is powered to go about 8 knots.  We
live east of Seattle, and if we kept the boat in this area, not only
would our moorage be very expensive but we'd never get where we want to
go on a weekend cruise.  For a variety of reasons we have no interest in
boating in the lower Puget Sound area.  But that's where we would have
to do most of our boating if we kept our slow (but economical) trawler
in the Seattle area.

Instead, we keep the boat in Bellingham, almost 100 miles north of where
we live.  We can drive to Bellingham (in a 30 mpg car) in about an hour
and a half.  From Bellingham, at our boat speed, we can be in the middle
of the San Juan islands in one to four hours, depending on where we
decide to go.  So we (and everyone else in Bellingham, Blaine, and
Anacortes) can on a weekend go to places where lots of boaters in the
Seattle area--- particularly those with full-time jobs--- can only plan
on visiting once or twice a year because the speed of their boats means
they need a day or more to simply GET to the islands, let alone spend
any time in them.

And given the traffic in the Seattle area, it probably doesn't take us
all that much longer to drive the freeway to Bellingham to work on the
boat as it would to fight the local traffic to get to a more local
marina.

So by keeping our slow boat what seems like a long distance from our
house, we end up using it year round because we're able to boat in the
area we want to boat in.  There are probably only three or four weekends
a year that we don't go up to the boat, either to go out on it, work on
it, or just stay on it for the weekend.  We often drive up to Bellingham
after work on Fridays so we're ready to leave the marina at first light
on Saturday.

I'm sure some areas of the country are not conducive to this sort of
arrangement, but if your area is, it's a great way to take advantage of
the economy of a slower boat, the lower purchase price of an older boat
(many of which, like GBs, tend to be powered to be slow), and lower
moorage costs, and still be able to boat in the waters you enjoy the
most.

______________________________
C. Marin Faure
GB36-403 "La Perouse"
Bellingham, Washington