What’s it like living onboard?

We often get asked by friends, “what’s it like for the 2 of you living onboard?”. For people who have not been on a sailing yacht before it must be hard to imagine how much space there is and so it’s not surprising that some assume that there is hardly any room to move, that we must constantly be getting in each other's way and that we must be almost bent double as we move around the saloon. When you start looking at buying a yacht you fairly quickly realise that 2 yachts of the same length can have a markedly different amount of space down below. You also quickly realise that on a sailing yacht everything is a compromise and you have to decide on your personal priorities to find the design of yacht which suits you.

For example there are 42ft long yachts which have more cabins, bunks and, in some cases, much more volume down below than BV has. However, that extra space below can come at the cost of sailing performance, particularly in stronger winds. If you go for a hull design which handles heavy weather well, you will almost certainly find that it is slower than a racing thoroughbred but that it has the benefit of a significantly more comfortable motion as the waves pass. But if you go for a heavier and smaller volumed hull that generally handles heavy seas well and then choose to cram it full of as many cabins and bunks as you can, you won’t have much living space in the saloon or much stowage space for food and spares.

One of the other significant factors is tankage. Our last yacht was a Starlight 35; a highly capable yacht which handles heavy weather well but was still fairly quick for a cruising yacht. Brokers would probably classify her as a ‘Performance Cruiser’ and her new owner has already successfully sailed her across the Atlantic to explore the Caribbean. For us though, we always felt that the water and fuel tanks were too small for the sailing which we wanted to do and we could see no workable way of retrofitting a holding tank (essential in the Eastern Med) without some very interesting plumbing and using up most of the stowage space. Hence we moved up to the larger Rustler 42

So when friends ask, “so how many people does BV sleep?” we always feel that the, “she has 7 berths” answer somewhat misses the point. You could probably describe BV best by saying that she sleeps 2 couples very comfortably. Therefore going right back to the question at the beginning of this post, “what’s it like for the 2 of you living onboard?”, the answer is actually that with just 2 of us onboard she is very comfortable indeed. I’ll give a little more detail in my next post so that you can understand why and elaborate on some of the compromises we balanced in our choice of yacht.