After that week in San Carlos Mexico sailing with Steve, I started looking at boats. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to handle the whole “living on a boat” business, after all I had a house and job! But I started looking at boats anyway, and a plan emerged. Both my kids were launched with degrees and careers and families (Kenzie was dating Julio and they were planning to get married soon.). We discussed how they could rent the upstairs and live in my house, and we could rent the downstairs to someone and cover my mortgage. I had enough in savings that I could buy a boat and bum it for 5 years before I had to decide what or how to proceed. That is a topic for another post.

I had decided that I wanted my boat to be fairly small and simple, no more than about 28 feet or so. If I was going to live on it it had to be comfortable and safe, but small and simple costs a lot less to buy and to keep up, plus is easier to sail, moor, or anchor. It did not have to have any fancy accommodations. I am used to roughing it after a life of camping so I don’t need anything fancy (or expensive!) A simple 1 burner kitchen with no refrigeration would be fine. A simple bathroom with a porta potty (or even a bucket) would be fine. Standing head room in the cabin would be nice but not an absolute requirement, since I could always stand as tall as I wanted out in the cockpit.

I wanted to avoid having an inboard engine for reasons to be discussed in another post.

I really likes Steve’s Balboa 27, but as I started looking there are not many of those around. In 6 months I only saw 1 for sail on the west coast!. I did a ton of research about styles and brands, and looked on various websites to look at what was available. There were a ton of Catalina 27s for sale, which is a good boat but they had a few design elements that I thought were a bit odd so I didn’t enthuse over them. I looked at Columbias, Newports, and others. I also saw many Ericson 27s which have a great reputation. I admit I did not have much if any experience with any of these types of boats but I was learning fast. Fortunately, the internet provided a wealth of info and I could look at hundreds of detailed pictures of them all, and read reviews by hundreds of people about what they liked and didn’t like

Along with “what” I also had to consider “where” since these boats weigh over 3 tons and are not easily trailerable without special rigs and permits, so wherever I bought it was where I would live until I could sail it somewhere else. I loved the Puget Sound area and started looking there first. I quickly realized though that it is cold and wet 9 months a year there, so any boat I got needed to have a heater, which in a small boat is hard to fit in. And I would need to be prepared for a very rough experience. I also realized that sailing in Puget Sound is very very hard, as the wind is either dead calm or raging, very little in the “moderate” range, and the currents in and around the islands can be very challenging, up to 5-8 knots in some areas. This would be a very hard place to learn to learn to sail in. It seemed that when people talked about “sailing” up there what they meant was that they motored around in a sailboat. Not exactly what I had in mind….

I focused my attention next on boats in California, mainly the Los Angeles area, because there is the whole string of islands there to sailing out and around to and explore. I knew that most of the marinas don’t allow you to live full time in the marina so I needed to be able to get out and sail somewhere close by every week for a few days, and the islands were perfect for that. Plus it is warm there!

I drove out for a week after Christmas 2009 to check out several I had seen on line. It was a fun week, looking at boats, going out on many of them for sea trials, meeting sailors, many of whom are friends to this day!

I really liked an Ericson 27 I saw at Dana Point, and liked Dana Point marina. It is a bit off the beaten path of the LA metro area, but close enough to the airports if I needed to fly in or out. Sort of an upscale area but the marina is simple and safe.

Most of these boats are going for dirt cheap. With the downturn in the economy people were letting them go very cheap to get out from having to make the monthly slip fees. This Ericson 27 was a 1977, solid as a rock, had 5 good sails, well rigged. Everything was in good shape even though it was old and some things needed to be replaced, she was perfectly serviceable as is. I was prepared to pay at least as much again as I paid for it in upgrades and repairs, but the core boat needed to be solid which this one was.

Back home and after letting all this settle in for a while, I decided to go back out to look at the Ericson again. (She didn’t have a name by the way. I later found out she may have been called “Aloha” but I am not too sure.) I flew out to take another look along about the end of January. Because of some very bad weather and because the guy selling her really wasn’t much of a sailor, I never got a chance to take her out for a sail before I bought her, but I spoke to several people who had been out on her and others that had been involved in her maintenance and they all raved about how good she was. I handed the guy the cash and had myself a boat! 

 In hind sight that was pretty dumb, I should have sailed her first before I bought it, but I guess I was impatient to get on with it, and I  took a chance. I have not regretted it for one moment. It turned out to be a very good choice.