Nearly all respondents have been various shades of green with envy but one or two have been politely negative about our decision to buy a Westerly Vulcan and I can understand that
So I thought I'd expand on yesterdays post with some of the logic and reasoning behind the decision
Firstly let's deal with the aesthetics. She is without doubt a bit of a Marmite boat looks wise. You know, you either like it or loathe it! With the best will in the world the Vulcan could never be described as a pretty boat, I have to confess but then we'll be on the inside looking out :)
In fact, I had been expecting to be put off by the looks when we went to look at her and I found that I rather like her style. She's chunky, purposeful and honest and the colour scheme has been carefully chosen to ease her lines and avoid her looking like a total brick. A bit of a brick, maybe but not a total brick!
Looks are however only superficial. They are also a matter of opinion.
The other negative comment that has been raised is the potential sailing performance. And here I think it is a matter of expectations. If you buy seven and a half tons of floating brick with shallow bilge keels and a rig that is modest by performance boat standards and then expect her to slice up to windward like a racing yacht you are most definitely going to be disappointed.
However, our sailing involves and will always involve relatively short hops from port or anchorage to port or anchorage with the absolute bare minimum of passage making. And when we set out on extended cruising as we plan to do as soon as we've spent all the money we need to spend on the things we need to spend it on, we'll have the luxury of not having to sail to a timetable.
So what if she sails to windward like a, well yes OK, brick? If the wind is blowing the wrong way we either go the other way, don't go at all or we bite the bullet and fire up the iron topsail. The plain truth of the matter is that in five years of bashing around the East Coast with trips as far afield as Norfolk, Chichester and Belgium, I can count the number of times we've spent more than an hour or two beating to windward on the fingers of one hand. It's fun for a while but after a while you start to think "I can spend the next six hours doing this or I can hit the starter and be there in three" and it's on with the engine again.
My only absolute requirement is that a boat be weatherly enough to claw her way off a lee shore in the event of engine failure. I'm satisfied the Vulcan will do that, if we can make her do better (and we do seem, somehow, to be able to get bilge keelers to go although I really don't know what it is we do right!) that will be a happy bonus.
The chunky, to some indeed ugly, looks and the unspectacular sailing performance are the price we are paying for a simply vast amount of space and comfort. As I said yesterday, she really is a tardis boat. Her relatively short length for the amount of accommodation will keep visitor mooring fees down (it's not relevant to our mud berth as we pay a 15m minimum charge so we can have a 4.5m dinghy on there as well if we like ... and that may one day happen as I quite fancy something to mess about in)
And the accommodation is simply awesome. And there's the rub you see
When you get right down to it, we'll be spending maybe forty or fifty days at sea at the most in any given year (except the Round Britain year when it will rise to around 120) which means we'll be spending well over three hundred days on board in our home berth, in a visitor berth or at anchor.
So in return for Marmite looks and staid sailing, we're getting a fabulously comfortable saloon, a really decent galley and three separate sleeping cabins (although I have designs on the aft cabin which may be converted into a workshop albeit with the ability to convert it back again quickly when we're going to sea or need the guest accommodation).
You might ask why we need those cabins when there's only two of us but we've got family and friends we like to have around and especially moving away from the Midlands it will be great to have the room for guests without compromising our living space.
And storage? Jeez, our biggest problem is likely to be losing stuff and never ever finding it again! There are even lockers in lockers! I may need storage ashore for the business before long but I think we can safely see that we will not need to store anything ashore for ourselves. In fact, the problem is likely to be ensuring that we don't revert to our bad habits of keeping stuff we don't really need.
Every choice of boat is a compromise. I would have dearly loved to buy an old gaffer, it has been my dream for as long as I can remember to one day own a classic gaff rigged pilot cutter or something of that ilk. But the reality is that within our budget, even stretched to within an inch of its life as it is now being, we were simply not going to get an adequate level of comfort and accommodation to make living aboard the year round a viable option (I know others manage quite happily sometimes in extraordinarily small boats but it wouldn't work for us).
On this decision I firmly put the heart in its box and made a strictly head choice. The Vulcan not only hits all the essential nails on the head, it bangs them firmly into the woodwork and clenches them over on the other side for good measure!
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