Cruising with three young children, a staple of everyday, often several times a day, is swimming. Where there is swimming on a sail boat, there are wet towels hanging from the lifelines.
Tiring the boys with swimming is an important part of our daily sanity, but it sure does suck to have big wet beach towels hanging like it’s laundry day. Worse still if its raining and we have to bring them inside, worse that a wet dog.
Now that we have purchased our Tartan 41, we have the issue of getting it home. Currently in Annapolis, we have to bring it back to Lake Champlain. I’ll be posting about that trip very soon, but this post is about emergency beacons, PLB’s and SPOT devices.
I want to get one for the trip, but which one?
Spoiler alert… there is no best boat….
Over the last couple of months I have exhaustively been looking for a boat. The two best places to do this are the two main web listings for sail boats for sale.
www.yachtworld.com (brokers)
www.sailboatlistings.com (private sales)
I have also posted a few threads on my two favorite sailing forums:
www.sailnet.com
www.cruisersforum.com
In all of this, I have learned a few truths.
How much does it cost to live aboard a boat?
A pretty critical question, and fortunately, there are several resources available from sea-going bloggers who have kept track. Reading these over, it seems about $2000-2500 a month. The question on every cruisers lips is, “how long can I last?”
Like lots of people, we are what I would call “Leisure Sailors”. We have been sailing a couple of years on a relatively small sailboat on “safe-ish” waters. In ours case, we have a O’Day 28 Tartan 41 on Lake Champlain.
We go sailing as much as we can, or to be more accurate, the Captain (Dad), drags his boys for weekend sailing with varying amounts of enthusiasm displayed by the crew.
Frequently, said crew are bribed with various offers such as uninterrupted sunbathing, use of iPad, a movie to watch, copious chocolate or soda (depending on crew member).
Sailing With Kids 