Greetings from a converted long time Sailor to Trawler World

[tpsmith17]

Good morning all of you many I am sure sitting on your boats drinking coffee and enjoying the good life..
My wife and i are preparing for a new stage in our life that has involved several steps.
First and hard to do was selling our beloved Island Packet 38 that was our dream boat for years of great sailing here on the NC coast.
Second is approaching retirement(wow) and our desire to become live aboard Trawler owners.
We are now in the search for our "perfect" boat and really am overwhelmed by the number of beautiful boats on the market at this time. We hope to complete the search by early Spring 2015 and full move aboard in August.
Being very familiar with boating life and the trials and tribulations that both grow that love and at time grind your teeth into dust we are sold on the lifestyle and our goal is to travel from Mystic CT in summer to Key West in winter enjoying the time and meeting some of you wonderful guys along the way.
So this is a long winded hello but hope to get to know and interact with you as we move along this stage of our life.
T&B

[jwnall]

Welcome aboard. Lots of ex-sailors on here, who have converted for whatever reason to the trawler lifestyle. We look forward to hearing from you as your search for a boat progresses.

[RT Firefly]

Greetings,
Welcome aboard. Currently it's the NC roast. Forecast for this afternoon is 110F+ with the heat index....The perfect boat for ME today is one with over sized AC. Holy crap it's hot!

[bayview]

Many ex sailors here. When we searched we looked at a lot of boats in order to see what features were available in power boats. As we learned more we found ourselves moving away from the boats with sailboat looks and embracing the features and designs allowed by the hull shape of power boats.
Generally power boats can have more interior and deck space that sail. Don't let the first dozen you see convince you that all power boats are huge. Some are much bigger inside than others and after a while you will begin to differentiate. Listen to your wife's opinions, at least in my case she was far more observant of livability than I was.

Eventually we made a short list of must have features and narrowed our search wit that list. Since we planned to spend a lot of time aboard lots of interior volume and being safe and easy to get around quickly became important. As we searched we also learned that fuel use was not determined by how the boat looks or what the maker called it but by displacement and operating speed. Engine size didn't matter much.

Having spent a lot of years sailing I was surprised at the differences in power boats and in general how little power boat owners knew about their boats and what affects performance compared to sailboaters.

As you search you will find many people think there is something magic applied to boats when maker name than trawlers. Look deeper and you will find a wide variety of designs named trawlers and a lot named something else, all with the same bottom design. Except for the amount of teak there is little difference in performance of semiplaning hull boats regardless of what they are called.

We also set the objective of looking long enough so that we would never get on someone else's boat of similar size and say we wish we had bought that one.

Good luck and have fun.