Thoughts on forward master cabin

My wife is a very light sleeper and she is able to sleep underway in our Krogen's forward stateroom. I can sleep anywhere/anytime so underway I sleep in the pilothouse to be near the action unless I have additional very competent crew so that there are two people in the pilothouse.

I think the only person who can answer the OP's question is the OP. Sleeping preferences are totally different from person to person.

We have both a fore and aft cabin. We sleep in the aft cabin but we don't mind wind and water noise against the hull. In fact, as long as we know what the nose is we prefer a "noisy" night to a dead quiet night. Wave slap against the side of our hull is nice, in our opinions.

When we have guests they sleep in the forward cabin (V-berth with its own head) and all of them have remarked how well they slept up there. Best sleep ever, a few have said, which rather surprised us. I've slept up there once when one of us had a cold and was coughing a lot. We were on a mooring and the bay had waves running into it. I don't recall hearing any slapping sound but there was a constant "chuckle" of waves rippling past the hull plus the motion of the boat pitching up and down. I very much liked it.

But other people would not be able to sleep under these conditions. So if the OP is a light sleeper and the kinds of sounds that a boat makes at anchor or on a mooring would disturb him it would seem that a forward cabin, regardless of it's layout and spaciousness, would be a bad choice.

As others have said, best try it out first before making any sort of purchase decision. Charter a similar boat, beg a ride with someone with a similar type of boat, whatever needs to be done to find out firsthand what it's going to be like up there.

Marin said:

I think the only person who can answer the OP's question is the OP. Sleeping preferences are totally different from person to person.

As others have said, best try it out first before making any sort of purchase decision. Charter a similar boat, beg a ride with someone with a similar type of boat, whatever needs to be done to find out firsthand what it's going to be like up there.

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Absolutely and do not purchase a boat with a forward master cabin until you have done that. If you think you'll have difficulty sleeping that may become a self fulfilling prophecy or, if you are able to have an open mind, you may find it really is nothing. However, until I'd resolved that concern directly, I wouldn't go down that path.

Sleeping in the forward cabin

Ok folks, wow thats so much information, love the jokes. Sleeping would just be when we are at anchor not really when we are on a long passage, its not like we will be doing another Atlantic passage or another Fort Lauderdale to St John.

We always use an anchor snubber so the chain shouldn't bother us too much after all most boats have a distance between the headboard and anchor locker.

Thank you all.
The Krogen Express 49, the American Tug 41 and the Navigator - Californian 48
are on our list to take a look at when we can.

At the moment sat waiting for a buyer for our own yacht.

BFN

BandB said:

The key to this thread may be though that the OP said she's a light sleeper. We're heavy sleepers so the sound wouldn't bother us. The height is where the problem often comes in for me and it's not the clearance on the bed, but it's getting to it and walking around it.

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Agree, and I (we) have no real way to quantify how "some noise" might impact...

Actually trying it out -- chartering or whatever -- seems like a useful idea, but we find the actual noise level also seems to vary all over the map. Sometimes gentle rippling, sometimes more aggressive wave slap, depending on wind and sea states. I'd think it might take more than just a couple days on charter to decide what's acceptable... and variance from boat to boat (is the charter the same as the target candidate) might be difficult to control for, too. IOW, there's likely still some guesswork required...

Yep, our big step up is an issue. We deal with it, but I'd have preferred less height -- one less storage drawer underneath would probably do it, two less would be even better, but then of course storage become an issue, too.

If I were designing our lottery boat, I think I'd make it a standard household size and at the same time set the whole mattress lower and further aft. My goal would be to have the thing easier to make up with standard linens, and with about 4/5ths of each side truly walk-around. That'd offer a chance to waste some space up near the anchor/rope locker, but I'd guess that could be fashioned into storage for stuff that's not used as often.

In my lottery boat, this would be the guest stateroom anyway, though (remembering that fictional full-beam master I mentioned before), so I wouldn't care all that much.

-Chris

ranger42c said:

That'd offer a chance to waste some space up near the anchor/rope locker, but I'd guess that could be fashioned into storage for stuff that's not used as often.

-Chris

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That's actually what our small open Riva does. First time you see the forward cabin (the only cabin on it) you're surprised at the amount of room and wonder how they accomplished it. On the front deck there is a huge full width locker.