Welcome to Sailing Trivial Pursuit…

I have for a long time had an obsession with boats that has verged on unhealthy. I first sailed in my early teens with my dad in a Mirror Dinghy at Bough Beach Sailing Club in Kent and then at Worthing. We weren’t very good at it and there wasn’t anywhere very close to home (in land locked Surrey) that we could sail so we simply didn’t get the practice. I’d always wanted to get back in a boat and around 20 years later, in 2007 (now married with two children), I became a member of Bolton Sailing Club and started again. My children at this time were aged 6 and 2, and in the time since, they have also both learnt to sail at Bolton Sailing Club. My wife has dinghy sailed with me a couple of times with mixed reviews (mainly good ones). I love dinghy sailing, and the physical and technical challenge that it offers.

I have always had the dream of owning a yacht and the adventure this could offer, completing my RYA Competent Crew and Day Skipper qualifications over the last 10 years, through Plas Menai in North Wales.

My obsessive reading of the Yachting press and pretty much any book I could lay my hands on did build on my knowledge of yachts; their design, performance and sea keeping abilities. Most importantly it made me realise that there would be compromises to any boat, but it was understanding which compromises I was willing to make, and which would be forced upon me.

The compromises (for me) emerged as:

1. Cost. Like most I don’t have an unlimited budget.
2. Comfort. I wanted my wife to enjoy the boat and therefore had to be of a size that allowed this (including standing headroom).
3. A good sea boat. A great deal of modern cruisers focus on internal volume and living space that results in a hull shape that that inevitably bounces over waves rather than cutting through them.
4. Pretty. I know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but there are plenty of ugly boats out there – if I was going to become a boat owner it needed to be kind to the eye.

The more I read, the more I understood and came to realise that the 1970s and 80s were a fantastic period for British boats of stunning build quality and sea keeping ability. I was first attracted to the Contessa 32. An absolute classic and older sister of the equally spectacular Contessa 26 designed by David Sadler and built by Jeremy Rogers on the South Coast. The Contessa 32 was the only Yacht in its class to complete the infamous 1979 Fastnet Yacht Race that, tragically, claimed the lives of 15 sailors.

So the Contessa 32 is well built, pretty, and a fantastic sea boat – in his book, Cape Horn to Starboard, John Kretschmer offers further testament to this latter point. However, I also began to read that a product of that sleek hull was also cramped accommodation and that comfort is compromised through the narrow beam. This is significant as on the long term it is not my intention to sail alone, but with Julia, my wife, and my two daughters. To stand a chance of getting a boat it needed to offer greater comfort than I knew the Contessa 32 could.

None the less, my attraction to the Contessa’s led me to look at their younger cousins, the Sadler boats – also a British Boat and, not surprisingly designed, by David Sadler and built by Sadler Yachts on the South Coast. I was particularly drawn to the Sadler 34 as it had the additional space that I felt was important, but was again very pretty with an excellent reputation as a good sea boat – well it would be, it comes from an exceptional pedigree.

I perused the market looking at Sadlers for years, Julia was on board with the idea, and then in April 2022 a Sadler came on the market for £28,000 based at Preston Marina in Lancashire. Now Preston is by no means the ideal place to keep a deep fin keel yacht, but it does have the advantage of being 45 minutes from home in Bolton and offers a competitive rate per metre.

We took a look at the boat and made an initial offer of £26,000 which was promptly knocked back. It was apparent that there was a lot of interest in the boat, so we depleted all our savings accounts and went in with the full asking price which was duly accepted.

Three weeks later she was given a clean bill of health (with a few minor pieces of work needed) and arrangements made for final payment. On 29th July 2022, I again did the short journey to Preston Marina to meet Mike and his family, who had owned the boat for the previous 28 years, and the deal was done – we were the new custodians of Trivial Pursuit.

My reason for creating this blog is, in the first instance, as a journal for myself, so that I can log the highs and lows of yacht ownership as well as many of the practical tips and tricks I have already started to find out (sometimes the hard way). I hope that as this blog develops it shows the absolute enjoyment I get through Trivial Pursuit both in the dock and out at sea and sharing knowledge along the way.