Buying a bigger boat isn’t always as easy as it first appears but the rewards are worth it in the end. Matt Dale reveals the truth about upsizing
Howhard can it be? You want a bigger boat. You search for a bigger boat. You find a bigger boat. Then you buy a bigger boat. Except it rarely runs as smoothly as that...
We bought our bigger boat in January last year and had her delivered in February, but the search started three years ago. In fact, the process itself began at least a year before that when I set out to persuade my wife Jillie that we needed to upgrade our 19ft Yamarin 59 HT.
Putting on a dodgy American accent and quoting Chief Brody from Jaws with the immortal line “We’re gonna need a bigger boat!” would have been counterproductive. And my actual thought process of “I would like a bigger boat because I want a bigger boat, because it would be nice to have a bigger boat,” wasn’t going to cut it either. Much like the infamous N+1 formula, which states that the optimal number of cars/golf clubs/surfboards etc is the number you already have +1, I just felt we needed a bigger boat.
While Jillie wasn’t averse to the idea, she did start asking awkward questions such as: Where would we keep it? What would the annual running costs be? How much would we use it? Even I had to admit that these were valid points, especially the last one – I’m a farmer so August is my busiest month.
After a lot of pestering, of a level that a three-year-old would have been proud of, Jillie came around to the idea of a larger vessel (or at least got bored of my whining) and relented to start looking at potential boats. Thankfully, marina browsing is one of our favourite pastimes. Wandering up and down pontoons window-shopping boats is actually a great way to decide exactly what it is you are looking for. If the owners happen to be on board, then make nice noises about their boat and you will often be invited aboard for a look. We are all suckers for compliments, especially if they relate to our boat, child, dog etc. This resulted in one particularly memorable and very enticing tour of a brand new Sargo 31. The utterly charming owners had collected it from the Hamble and stopped in our local marina of Falmouth on their way back to the west coast of Scotland.
This helped us narrow down the choice to a Scandi-style commuter boat with an enclosed wheelhouse. Scandinavian boats tend to have a good reputation for build quality and seakeeping while something around 30ft would have enough room for the pair of us to cruise and liveaboard for a couple of weeks at a time. We liked the idea of a simple two-deck layout with a sunroof rather than a flybridge, a usable foredeck and a decent aft cockpit, but it was only when we started looking in earnest that we realised we
