BOAT wrote:yeah, I could not believe the crap we got trapped in even in my Dad's little 23 foot Aquarius - terrible squalls in the Sea of Cortez - you go to bed on a nice warm calm night and wake up 2 hours later to 50 mile per hour winds and 5 foot swells and a dragging anchor!! It's nut's I tell you! No warning at all! And that's just a 1/2 mile off shore!!!
The Aquarius lists 2280 displacement with 815lb of ballast. It would probably fare much better than our light Macs.
The ocean is an unpleasant place to be in a storm. My family would never step foot on a boat again if we were caught in a nasty blow. I'm landlocked now and forced to sail on mountain lakes which are famous for wild T-Storms coming up and making our 200 foot deep lake turn wild. It's amazing the waves that can form. We've lost quite a few local sailors because they were caught in these storms and it frightened them out of the sport.
Matt has done some good research and knows how to weather these things. That boat sure looks nice.
mastreb wrote:According to Mike, the bare boat will be $500K with an AL mast, so it might squeak in at $1M properly fit out for cruising with the carbon mast. In any case, the buying of it won't be nearly as difficult as the keeping of it. A '70 long boat is just going to be expensive to own unless you're actually out in the ocean with it full time. It's not a boat I can afford to keep.
I do have requirements beyond best possible seakeeping ability and highest possible speed if I actually want to be sailing a lot. I do know what I'm getting into with a relatively beamy boat, as I have lived at sea for years and know well the creeping exhaustion that's caused by heavy weather. I was young then, and the boat was bigger, but I enjoy the sea and moderate weather is a challenge I look forward to. As long as you're not trying to keep a schedule, you can maximize the good weather and wait out the bad as long as the boat stays dry.
Schedules are the ultimate cause of deaths underway.
Matt
$500k for a 70 fast boat would put it into the hands of many wanna be racers. $1m with carbon spars makes that boat an extremely cheap serious racing boat. But it will never be a modern cruising boat with that narrow beam. That's just not what people expect in a 70' cruising boat.
Roger is an old salt sailor and not known for modern marketing. I mean the Mac website was written with Frontpage 95. Take a look at other boat builders websites like Benteteau, Hunter, Oyster etc. and you are blown away with how magnificent those boats look online. The Mac 26 had a market that no other builder could touch. Cheap, light safe boats that were fun and easy to own. What was he advertising it for, $23K. My fully fitted boat cost me less than my car. Nobody else could do that.
Dang this thread has morphed into several topics.
So how about some more photos Matt? And Get BOAT out on that thing to calm him down.
RussMT wrote:
Dang this thread has morphed into several topics.
So how about some more photos Matt? And Get BOAT out on that thing to calm him down.
Yeah, sorry I hijacked a thread, but really it sort of applies to any of us looking at bigger boats or "when thing's really escalate rapidly" at the boat show an' all.
I will crew on Matt's boat anytime in any weather - no doubts at all. But I will probably never calm down on the beam thing - I still feel better in the narrow boats than i do in the beamy boats - (In fact I prefer the double enders the most for the long haul ocean stuff).
I don't even think they make double enders anymore - they were more common in the 70's
I would not be proud to say that I pick a boat based on it's marketing - in fact I would think that's a rather silly thing to admit to.
The keel is a 6' (2.0m) fin with a 2000 lb. cast iron flat bulb at the bottom. It bolts on and off easily for shipping, and the hull is otherwise flat to the chines.
These modern boats are built to ship easily via barge, and there are even MX trucking services that will haul them back up to San Diego from Cabo San Lucas--so you can sail downwind and pay a trucker to sail upwind for you . The mast unbolts and all the cables have connectors underneath in the cabin so you can just unplug, unrig, unbolt, and go. It's not as simple as a Mac by any means but its WAY simpler than shipping a full keel multi-mast boat. I'm beginning to think that fin keel sloops are preferred simply for the economics of manufacturing and shipping rather than performance. But hey, if it makes a $1M boat cost $250K, then all is good.
Those chubascos can be very treacherous in the Sea of Cortez. I've never been caught in one but I've got friends that fish there that have been. They spoke of hurricane force winds out of nowhere in the middle of the night and being blown ashore by it.
I have been caught in those big April swells in the San Pedro channel in my MacGregor. It takes them surprisingly well, but it takes all the motor they've got to deal with them properly. I wouldn't want to get caught in them in a 26 footer that didn't sling at least 50hp on the back. Also, don't go topside to secure a loose halyard. That was a mistake.
I'm looking forward to getting the bigger boat out there to see what it's like.
Ultimately, you do what you can do to avoid weather, you learn storm tactics for weather you can't avoid, and you increase your odds by being on the biggest boat you can be on in the smallest storm you can. And you get your affairs in order in case nothing works out. That's why I won't be doing my world cruising until the kids are out of the house and on their own. Until then, it's just practice.
I do intend to sail until I don't come back. I think being lost at sea is a lot more epic than being lost in a hospital waiting room.
Yeah, "scatter brain" is a real problem for me but really for a guy with autism i do pretty well - I just can't trust myself to make good decisions all the time so I tend to put my faith in having a good boss instead of trying to be a good boss and so forth. There are chiefs, and there are Indians and I am definitely an Indian.
I will go anywhere on the "mastreb beamy Bennie" boat as a crewman anytime but not because I am a great fan of fancy marketing or plush interiors but because i trust the captain. For me that is the bottom line - "not the boat but the skipper".
Oh common' I bought my BMW because the comercial said it was the ultimate. It was Christmas time and the car on TV had a beautiful model who opened this big red bow to reveal the car. It works.
That's a really good point. Every time I get "2 foot itus" I find that going out on my Mac is quite calming. Most bigger boats simply can't do all the things the does.
RussMT wrote:
BOAT wrote:BMW does not need any marketing
Neither did the Mac 26 boats. Sold every one he could build.
We took the MacGregor over to Shelter Island to listen to Tori Amos' concert at Humphrey's from their Marina. Took an hour (vs. four) to get their in the Mac, and they could accommodate a 26' but not a 38' in their guest slip.
Two things a bigger boat can't do, right there.
We've gotten very lazy on the Mac as well, sailing out until we felt like we were done, and then dropping the hammer and being snugged in 30 minutes later. The first time we went out on the big boat, the Admiral decided she was done after three hours, and it took another three hours to get back. Those last three hours were WAY longer than the first three.
Oh, and Russ, the new boat's name is just "Luna Sea" as well. Now we use the make as the boat's last name to differentiate them, as in "Luna Sea MacGregor" and "Luna Sea Beneteau".
. The mast unbolts and all the cables have connectors underneath in the cabin so you can just unplug, unrig, unbolt, and go. It's not as simple as a Mac by any means but its WAY simpler than shipping a full keel multi-mast boat. I'm beginning to think that fin keel sloops are preferred simply for the economics of manufacturing and shipping rather than performance. But hey, if it makes a $1M boat cost $250K, then all is good.
does.