Beth Leonard sorts cruising budgets into three tiers, and re-sorting our worksheet into her columns made it obvious which one our short list of boats actually lives in.
If the new-build mix has been roughly half multihulls for years and the used market hasn't fully caught up, the resale math on a 2028 catamaran purchase looks different than the brokers are pricing today.
Six people in a dinghy is two trips, an overload, or a different dinghy than the one you thought you wanted. Nine months of pencil work and four constraints later, here is what I am buying.
On a monohull the JSD is solved physics. On a cat you have two transoms, two snatch loads, and a bridle geometry nobody quite agrees on.
Same four-cabin layout as the Saba 50, $100K cheaper — until you cost out the saildrive bellows, the rig service, and the sails the charter program never replaced.
Real product names, real weights, real prices. The ground tackle list I'm building before the boat — and where I'd spend more than the chart says to.
I priced our first year on a 50-foot cat for a family of six line by line. The number keeps coming out to $174,000 — and the spread between honest budgets and forum fantasy is wider than people think.
The Bermuda-to-Azores window in late May is a high you want parked, a low you want predictable, and a 500mb chart I'd rather see flat than amplified.
A 2015 Saba 50 came across my desk this week — the layout is right for our family of six, but the bridge deck question is still the one I can't answer from the broker's email.
Behan Gifford argues you should optimize the boat for the 90% case, not the worst night — and with four kids and a 50-foot deck, that's making me rethink the layout question.
I asked nine underwriters to quote our family circumnavigation. The two real bids came in 71% apart — and the cheaper one was the wrong policy.
I tracked 47 catamaran sales for six months and the spread between Lagoon and Outremer haircuts is wider than supply alone explains.
