After learning to sail, the next phase was to find a boat.  I'd had enough of crewing aboard other people's boats.  While it's great experience, it just isn't the same as having my very own boat.  I don't know if it's because I long for the freedom of being able to go out on my own, or if it's the same anxiety I get when I go out with strangers for a night on the town without my own car and being stuck at the mercy of other people's ambitions for the evening.  I like to think it's just because I have long since dreamed of single-handing and spending nights under the stars instead :)

I began my research into the right boat by doing some searches on the Internet about single-handed sailors.  The first site I came across was http://www.atomvoyages.com.  James Baldwin wrote all about his sailing adventures in his Pearson Triton named "Atom" and I was hooked.  I read everything he recommended and studied up on a lot of other sailors similar to his style.  The cruising style of Baldwin and others like him is to find affordable, old, sturdy boats with full keels, heavy displacements and shallow drafts.  The reasons are many and very logical for this style of boat.  I will not go into the reasons here as you may as well read it where I read it: http://www.atomvoyages.com/articles/boatlist.htm.

After reading through a lot of his material and researching each and every boat on his list, I came to realize that I learned to sail on a boat designed by the grandfather of these boat designs, Carl Alberg.  The Milwaukee Community Sailing Center has a large fleet of Pearson Ensigns which are spectacular little boats.

This pretty much sealed the deal.  I had sailed on some racing boats like the J/24 and the Merit 25 and didn't like them one bit.  The light displacement and flat bottoms made for an unsettled feeling in the water and made me seasick in rough seas.  I was going to find myself a nice heavy displacement "Good Old Boat".  I had no idea it would take the amount of time and compromises that it actually wound up taking.

Early on in my searches I had thought that a Pearson Triton would be a natural best choice.  There were plenty online, but most of them were on the East coast.  No problem!  Right?  I'll just have it hauled home!  Wrong!  While the cost of trucking the boat half way across the country is enough reason to not do it, you have a ton of other costs and considerations.  You have to fly to the location to see the boat, pay for accomodations, food, car rental and then find a local surveyor as I would want to do with a saltwater boat in the elements all year long.  Not only that, but you have to ready the boat for transport yourself.  This means getting it hauled out, fluids drained, everything stowed, and on and on.  Pay someone to do it all for you or fly out there again.

Okay - I need to find a boat on the Great Lakes and the closer to home the better.  Somehow I stumbled across an old Pearson Commander sitting right in my lap here in Milwaukee.  I called up Gene and he told me to come have a look.  I went to see it in a snowstorm and it was a challenge getting up the ladder and aboard.  It's a neat old boat, but unfortunately needed a little more TLC than I had to give being in school and with a pregnant wife.  I thought a lot about the boat and almost talked myself into it a few times, but eventually swung the other way.

Now I'm thinking, "these old boats are all going to need so much work and more attention than I can give".  I sailed on a Catalina 30 and really loved how roomy the interior was so now I set my sites on one of those.  Not only are they expensive, but they are not the greatest construction, have lots of problems with leaks, and have a fiberglass liner throughout restricting access to the hull and hiding all sorts of potential problems.  This is all notwithstanding that a 30 foot boat with an 11 foot plus beam sails like shit in anything but the calmest of seas.

Okay, I want a good old boat that I can afford that doesn't need much work.  I subscribed to all the theories about engines, layouts, rigs, hull designs, and you name it and decided that a Cape Dory was the answer.  Newer boat of solid construction with a great design.  Call up Gene again who's got a nice CD 28 on his list of brokered boats.  Diesel engine, full keel, good sized cockpit, dual settee layout.  V-berth is useless for anything but storage and the windows are so tiny I feel like I'm closed in a box, but still I could handle this.  Foiled again!  I didn't have that kind of money.

Next I decided that a Cape Dory 25 was perfect.  Outboard motor, small enough to fit on a trailer and sitll a pretty good design.  I found one for sale and took her out for a sea trial.  The outboard was ridiculously loud.  My wife would never stand for this.  She sailed beautifully though!  Went below and good lord is this thing cramped.  You don't realize how important standing headroom is in a boat until you get in one that doesn't have it on a rough day at sea.  Nice boat, but still not for me.

About this same time I was also seriously looking at a Pearson Ariel.  She was a great looking boat, but everything was original.  The decks needed to be redone, the keel void was leaking goop even though it was out of the water for several years.  I loved the boat and really felt like it was the one, but it just wasn't.

I stumbled across a Bristol 29 just around the time I decided to hang up my boat shopping shoes for the winter.  I figured I'd look at one more boat.  I went up and had a look and she was in much nicer shape than all the other "Good Old Boats" I'd seen.  New paint, new winches, new sails and all sorts of other extra gear.  She needed some cleaning up, but not bad.  I went home and didn't really have a dying urge to buy her, but felt like it was a nice boat.  A couple of weeks passed and I started thinking about the layout.  It was a dinette and I wasn't (still am not) really fond of that.  The boat also had an atomic 4, but so did almost every other boat that I looked at other than those with outboards and those things are friggin loud!

What the heck, I'll put in a lowball offer and see what happens.  If he rejects, I'll just see what's around come spring and if he accepts then I got me a boat!  Well, I got me a boat!