Green Rosetta Voyages and Other Trivia

  Part 1        Part 2        Part 3        Part 4 At the boat show, the boat broker companies harvest contact information in exchange for letting you visit the boats they are displaying. A few weeks after the show I got a call from Tom at JK3 Yachts. Tom was willing to listen me explain several contradictory aspects of types of boats that might interest me, and he kept his good humor throughout. We settled on a size of about 38'. That's plenty big enough to feel comfortable in the San Francisco Bay and out past the Golden Gate Bridge in coastal waters. I was also looking for an older boat since boats depreciate pretty quickly during their first five years. Helga and I picked 38' because the 36' Hunter we lived on in St. Petersburg had a comfortable salon, but the berths were too tight for our taste. We though the extra two feet, used the right way, would make the boat a lot more comfortable. Another reason we wa...

  Part 1         Part 2       Part 3      Part 4   At this point, enter my friend Oded, who is years ahead of me in learning about cruising on sailboats and boating in general. Oded is planning to retire and move onto a catamaran with his wife about a year from now. They have their rough itinerary for their first several years of cruising already planned out. Oded points out to me that while these common production catamarans sail away from, or "off" the wind just fine, they just don't sail into the wind "close hauled" very well. Most people don't even try. If they want to go in a direction that is upwind, they wait for the wind to change or just use the engines. There is nothing inherently wrong or bad with the catamaran design and sailing upwind, in fact, catamarans can be very fast and competitive. However, when catamarans are designed to be floating condos, with lots of room in a 40' or 42' pack...

Part 1      Part 2      Part 3        Part 4   Back to the boat show. They were only going to have Lagoon catamarans at the boat show, but they would have the 42, the design I had watched countless times in a few different YouTube videos, and the slightly larger Lagoon 450. We had just one day planned at the show, so after breezing by the sailing products inside, we made a bee line for the Lagoon 42. This is the front of the Lagoon 450S Four days on a Leopard 39 catamaran did not prepare us for the Lagoon 42 in person. The Lagoon is several feet wider than the Leopard and it's, well, big. It occurred to me that if we got one of these, I would be tempted to name it Moto Moto. So we toured the 42 and it's bigger brother the 450. It was great fun climbing around on and in the 42 and the 450 that I had viewed on video so much. After the initial rush of being on the actual boats faded, we discove...

Part 1     Part 2         Part 3        Part 4      If you have read the  "Why Sailing?" post, you know Helga and I are interested in cruising as well as day sailing, but we are still a few years away from real cruising. Sailing Bella, a Hunter 36, to the east side of Tampa Bay, we tied up and had lunch at Hooks After we returned from our sailing instruction week in St. Petersburg, I have to admit both of us were bitten pretty hard by the sailing bug. We had been waiting all fall and winter for the planned week of sailing in Florida during Helga's spring break. We had been watching sailing videos on YouTube, and after a week immersed in actual sailing we weren't ready to return to sailing vicariously. Timing was interesting as the Pacific Sail and Power Boat Show, in Richmond was scheduled for the week after we got back from Florida. Our marina at St. Petersburg, at sunrise   Throug...