When choosing a boat, in addition to Human Comfort, and the Boat’s Performance Factors, there’s the beauty of the boat. This is essential but extremely personal. To choose a spouse merely for beauty can be a short ride to hell and likewise with a boat. But why choose a spouse or boat you can’t find attractive? You will be dependent on the boat, living intimately within the boat, required to spend untold hours maintaining the boat – you had better love her.
If you’re planning on cruising with a partner – make sure both parties feel the same way about the boat you’re thinking of. My husband can love nearly any boat, he’s the Mother Teresa for sailboats, but I needed our first boat be lovely and immediately functional – I wanted to come to love her before being required to do the hard work necessary to turn an inexpensive used boat into a sea-worthy cruiser. It worked. The first boat he showed me was a box of parts and a beat-up hull. My heart wasn’t in that “boat”. The next (x) number of boats were also nixed by me, and I started to feel guilty. That’s too big, that’s ugly, that one is not rugged enough… on and on until I felt like I was squelching the idea. But at the same time I was getting my own ideas rejected … his comments were almost always “that’s too expensive”. Then one day we agreed on a boat, I still had doubts, he probably did too, but it met our rock-bottom criteria. And we sailed her for a couple of years before doing the hard work that was needed to turn her into an ocean cruiser (again).
There’s a reason that babies don’t come out of the womb as teenagers – we need to love our projects first, then hard work follows more naturally. But you need to know your “rock-bottom criteria” and have a realistic appraisal of your own capabilities to make or pay for needed changes. Read about Human Comfort, and Performance Factors to develop your own “rock-bottom criteria”.
