I bought my first sailboat, a 1989 Hunter 28 in 1995. I truly loved that boat. It was big, but not too big. It had a wheel, autohelm and enclosed head. It also had a pretty good stereo, roller furling. After a year or so, I added a new mainsail with a self-flaking system and four new self-tailing winches, and I was good to go. I think I paid about $25,000 for the boat in 1995 and sold her for about $28,000 in 2004. They say that the two best days of a boat owner’s life is the day they buy their boat and the day that they sell it. I don’t believe that. It was sad to sell my Hunter, but I also really wasn’t using it when we had little kids.
I have been thinking about getting back into sailing since the day I sold the Hunter 18 years ago. About 7 years ago we joined a club that let us use ski boats and surf boats, then about 2 and a half years ago, during covid, we bought a wake surf boat. While my daughter and her friends enjoy surfing and my sons like to tube, most of the time on the boat is me alone, bobbing around reading a book. It fun and I love being on the water, but I really missed sailing.
Last summer I started to look for a new sailboat more seriously. Nostalgia took me to a google search for a used Hunter 28 like the one I had owned previously. Hunter went out of business in the early 2000s, so most of the boat I could find were old. There were a few, they were pretty reasonably priced, but you could almost smell them over the internet. They were just old, mostly not well kept.
I really wanted another boat with many of the features that I had with the Hunter and the closest thing I could find was a Catalina 28 Mark-II. They stopped making these boat about 15 years ago. This model had a very similar layout to the Hunter, it had a wheel and a Yanmar diesel and seemed perfect. There are a number of them around and I kept searching on Yachtworld.com. When a boat would come up, I would mail the broker and by the time they responded the boat was usually sold. There was a boat up in Alaska but getting that boat to Seattle seemed tough.
There was also a 2006 boat here at the local broker, the problem was that they wanted you to buy the boat and leave it in their charter fleet. This might be a good deal for someone who wanted to use this as a business, but what I wanted was a boat that I could jump on to three or four times a week between April and September, and the idea of having to drive from my house in Bellevue to Shilshole Bay was going to add more stress than sailing was going to reduce. Word is that the dealer has been trying to sell this boat for years, and while the price keeps going down, the interest in the boat has not gone up.
While I was at the Catalina dealer, I also checked out the Catalina Capri 22. This was a very small boat, but it had the key features including roller furling jib, etc. The problem was that the dealer could really not promise a hard date for delivery and every time I had a question about the features and price of the boat, the boat went up a few thousand dollars. A boat that had been quoted for about $42,000 in June was over $50,000 by the early Fall.
So, I started to look at other new boats. The boat that I decided I HAD TO HAVE was a Beneteau First 27. This is an amazing boat that you might think of as the Porsche 911 of sailboats. The First 27 is a boat that was originally designed by a company called Seascape in Slovenia. Beneteau bought Seascape a few years ago and now offers two versions—a true racing boat like the one they made before the acquisition, called the First 27 SE, and toned-down model without the carbon rig, called the First 27. I was interested in the latter.
It is fast, it has amazing clean engineering and for a while in October I had to have it. Beneteau does an amazing job producing videos about their boats and the video on the First 27 has to the one of the best if not THE best.
Like most things in the current market (at least in October of 2022) they are impossible to get. When I first spoke to the dealer, Signature Yachts in Seattle, they were quoting 4-6 months to get one. I cannot say enough nice things about Signature Yachts. Both Mark and Tori were amazing sources of information and advice. They were super knowledgeable and super patient and I only wish I could have done business with them.
Mark and Tori arranged for my wife and me to see the one copy of the boat that was in Seattle. It was an amazing boat. The issue was that my wife thought that there wasn’t enough space in the cockpit for us to bring a bunch of friends out on the boat. My concern was that the boat didn’t have that much freeboard and that it would be a little tippy, especially as I planned to single hand the boat most of the time.
As I was considering my choices, I got a call from Mark at Signature Yachts as I was flying out to visit my son in college. Mark was at the Annapolis boat show and had met with the team from Beneteau North America. Apparently, there was a hull in Slovenia that was available since the person who had originally ordered it had cancelled. There were a bunch of features that I wanted, and I have to hand it to Mark and the team from Signature, they were able to get me everything I wanted for a price that was high, but lower than what I had expected to pay for the boat. The problem was I wasn’t convinced it was the right boat.
In the middle of all of this, I was working to make sure that I could find a lift to store the boat on. Our dock is on the lake, but in the summer, there is a ton of wake from ski boats (including ours) and in the Fall and Winter there is even more from the wind that comes up from the South. Good new was that I found a lift that would work for a boat the size of the First 27. The lift dealer sent me photos of the lift he was installing for the owner of a J/9, which of course got me looking at the J/9.
On paper, the J/9 was the right boat for me. Like the Beneteau, the J was about the size of my old Hunter, but it was even more optimized for single handing with features like a self-tacking jib. The J had a march larger cockpit and lots of seating—including my favorite passenger spot with is back to the bulkhead—the First 27 really didn’t have that.
When I got back to Seattle, my wife and I went to the dealer in Seattle to check out a previously sold J/9. Cockpit-wise it was everything my wife thought we needed. It also had the cool benefit of the option of an electric inboard motor. Not only would this keep me from going to get fuel, but it would eliminate the need for winterizing a diesel. If the Beneteau was a Porsche 911, then the J/9 is a BMW M3.
While we were at the dock at Shilshole, I showed my wife the Catalina 28 that was at the other dealer. She thought this was both too much boat and too much of a cruiser vs. what we needed. I also showed her the Catalina 275 which she thought was cool as well. I reached out to the Catalina dealer who said that there were major supply chain issues currently and that they could not take an order for a new 275 with an inboard diesel. They could take an order for an outboard. I told him that both Beneteau and J could get diesels. He called Catalina but they simply could not take an order.
A few days later, the local dealer called me to tell he that he had located a Catalina 275 in a place called Port Sanilac Michigan. It was a 2015 model that was allegedly in pretty good shape. The local dealer was vague on the details, so I reached out to the dealer in Michigan directly. We did a Zoom call on the guy’s phone and the boat looked pretty good. Apparently, it had been their demo boat from 2015 to 2020 and had spent those years in their showroom. When the first owner bought the boat in 2020, he had a set of Raymarine instruments and kept it at the same marina.
The boat was on the hard for the winter but was available for sale.
I made an offer and after some back and forth, we came to a deal. I had a survey done to the boat and the surveyor in Michigan, a guy named Jack Mormon who I cannot say enough nice things about, reported that the boat was like new with many accessories still in their original packaging. There was some mildew in the storage locker and on the cushions, but mostly because the boat was really not used. He promised me that it would all wipe out.
The local dealer also advised me to make the deal contingent on a local sea trial on the Catalina 275. I did this a few weeks ago on an amazingly clear crisp day in Seattle. Captain Fred took me out for about two hours, and I have to say that the C275 is the perfect boat for me. I wish it had a wheel, but otherwise it’s the right size.
The only real issue with the boat is that there is some water in the rudder, which apparently is pretty easy to remediate. We negotiated the price down a bit, I hired an escrow company, and the deal was done.
As I write this on Christmas day, the boat is on a truck someplace between Indiana and the West Coast and I hope to see it in Seattle by December 28th.
At the end of the day, I spent about 1/3 of the money for my slightly used C275 vs. either the Beneteau or the J, but more than money I think I got a boat that was more suited to my needs.
The key pros of the Catalina 275 over the other choices are:
- More freeboard (height from the deck down to the water)
- An enclosed head (the head on the Beneteau is sort of enclosed, but not really)
- Super large cockpit
- Has more instruments (chart plotter, depth gauge, etc) that I might even need, but I like tech
- It’s not new, so if I hit the dock as I am relearning how to sail its not that big a deal
There are some things that the other boats had that I plan to add to the C275 when it gets here:
- Stack pack for the mainsail
- Stereo (apparently Rockford Fosgate has a model that will integrate with my Raymarine plotter)
- Shore power with charging along with a second (house) battery
The story of the shipping is for another blog post as is the story of getting the boat out of Michigan before the snow came.
SV Twenty Questions 
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