The Beginning…
To start with: yachting was never, ever something I thought I’d be interested in when I was younger. Ripping round the Abrolhos in jet boats, tinnies and jetskis at 20kts was way more appealing than bobbing through the water at 4kts. I’d sailed small pelicans and been on the STS Leeuwin in high school, which was fun, but always preferred power boats .
However, when you get older you find that having boats is rather expensive. ‘Just a few metres longer’ quadruples not only the outright buying price, but also the maintenance, upkeep, and diesel costs. Not to mention pen fees - to be able to afford and keep the powerboat I wanted, I’d be working 24/7 365, completely defeating the purpose of having such a big boat.
Growing up at the islands - starting out on the tinny, moving up to the jetski, and now the crayboat
As you can tell from this website, I love underwater photography, and was looking into places I could travel to for this. I’ve never been out of Australia, and when I started planning international trips and adding up costs, I kept thinking ‘this is a LOT of money to spend on only a week of fun’. Working and working only to get a week out of your hard earned money didn’t seem like a good investment.
Around the same time, I had gotten a job as a deckhand on a tug boat. I really enjoyed the work (and still do!) but miss being out in the open ocean, far away from land. Some of my best memories are from my years working on the cray boat at the Abrolhos, you see some pretty incredible sights that you just don’t in busy ports.
There wasn’t really a moment where I decided that I wanted to go sailing. It was more a slow build up of watching a heap of YouTube videos of people travelling around and spearing from yachts, having friends buy their own, and running through the expenses of owning a bigger powerboat in WA. What really sold it was how keen my partner, Felix, was to get a yacht. With over 2000NM and a bight crossing under his belt, he’s no stranger to the old sailboat!
Felix sailing his father’s yacht, the Pelagia II, across the bight and around Esperance
And so the scheming began. We started looking at monohulls to begin with - much more affordable to buy second hand, and was what Felix had experience in. I could write an essay on the pros and cons of monohull vs. catamaran, but to keep it short and simple, after many months of research we decided that it would be worth the extra savings to invest in a catamaran for the following reasons;
Shallower draught
Being on a reduced angle while sailing
Much more comfortable at anchor
Faster cruising speeds
Larger living areas
There are negatives to choosing a catamaran over the monohull, but we felt that for what we wanted to use it for, the positives outweighed those negatives.
As we dove into researching what features made a good blue water catamaran, the $$ went up. Second hand catamarans in Australia are much more expensive than their monohull friends, and we were going to have to spend minimum $200k to get a boat the size we wanted (40-45ft), that was 20-30yrs old and still needed an extensive refit. We certainly didn’t want to buy other peoples problems, but to get something decent was way out of budget for us (anyone got a spare $800k sitting around they want to part with?!)
For those who don’t know us well, we have a bit of an obsession with rebuilding smaller fibreglass boats. That’s a story for another day, but the relevance is that we’ve spent many hours working with fibreglass to rebuild a Haines Hunter V19, and a Glasscraft V17. So when we found out that there are a few companies around the world that sell kit catamarans, we started getting a bit excited! Some of the yachts we looked at were the Fusion 40, Schionning Designs, and Spirited Designs.
In the end, we really loved the Schionning designs Arrow series of catamarans. They’re designed to be a mix of performance and cruising yacht - not quite full race spec, but capable of doing a cruising speed of ~10kts, and top speed of above 20kts!
If you’re interested, have a look over the Schionning designs page
https://schionningdesign.com/sdi/
I’ll wrap it up here. Thanks for getting this far - I’ll go into the design and vessel particulars in the next blog post.
