by admin on August 28, 2010
Rufus told me, when we bought Convivia, that Bill Lapworth designed the Cal 43 to “flex like a dolphin.” Lapworth quickly discovered that any possible performance edge that could possibly be gained by this design was not nearly valuable enough to have to re-tab the bulkheads after every sail. As a result the later Cal hulls were designed with quite a bit of extra stiffening, but obviously at the cost of weight and that dream that Bill had of making a supple, yielding boat. The early hulls (1-3 or 1-5) were left with a bit of a problem. In our case this problem was addressed by the addition of a set of quite beefy stainless steel supports. These run lengthwise as well as athwartship and do (from what I can tell so far) a decent job of keeping the boat together. [click to continue…]
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by victoria on August 25, 2010
There are many families living aboard and cruising with kids. We’ve been reading blogs and books and stories about sailing families and we’ve known for years that we would, one day, join those ranks. Now that we are aboard, we have found that we love the social aspect of the sailing life. Living aboard a small boat with children gives us common ground with people we may have never known otherwise.
A few years ago we met the inspiring Martin Family over dinner at their home in Maine and have since become friends. Their movie “Ice Blink” has become a favorite of ours. We made new friends, Lisa and Dean who live with their 3.5 year old son in Berkeley, because Lisa was Ruby’s substitute swimming teacher at the Y. We met Eric and Charlotte on Rebel Heart in San Diego when we went boat shopping for a boat very similar to theirs. We met Nicole and Brian on Soul Rebel near Portland, Oregon on our way back from picking up Convivia. Laureen and Jason on The Excellent Adventure are our neighbors in the Emeryville Marina in our harbor (they’re closer by water than by land). All of these friendships were forged through our mutual interest in sailing, and sailing with children.
Women and Cruising has an amazing feature right now with interviews with 12 families about their lives aboard their cruising sailboats. We met Pam Wall, one of these interviewees, about a year and a half ago and her enthusiasm for this life is mind blowing. These interviews on Women and Cruising would certainly give you the answers to why we live on our boat.
After years of reading these stories I decided to share some of our experiences from these first months. This post is specific to how we fit the kids and their stuff into our boat, a question I often get from both land and boat based families. Today I deemed the boat tidy enough to take some pictures and give you a tour. [click to continue…]
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Rating: +2 (from 2 votes)
