Catamarans VS trimarans VS monohulls is the never ending debate amongst sailors. Everyone has a personal favourite and an opinion about which one is the best. And knowing the type of the stereotypical sailor(man, because most of the sailors still on 2021 are sadly men) he is more than happy and willing to share his opinion. Even when no one asks for it.
Luckily it's up to the listener or the reader to decide whether to take on his advice. We listened to many people whilst looking for our boat and read even more online and of course we had our own experiences sailing different kinds of boats previously, but still it took us quite a lot of brainwork to decide what kind of a boat we were even searching for! A few things that we were considering were:
Safety
Sail-ability
Seaworthiness
Price
Maintenance
Space
We would have of course loved to have a nice spacious catamaran, a boat with two hulls and more than enough space to live comfortably and have guests on board, but with such a big boat comes big costs - you have double everything so you're going to pay double for everything. And double the time and cost for maintenance as well! Instead of sanding one hull for a new antifoul you're sanding two. And good cats aren't cheap to begin with. Also since we are quite new to sailing we wanted to stick with what we knew the best. For these reasons trimarans were out of the question as well.
We decided to go with an old boat because being novices in sailing we don't want to stress too much about putting a few marks on her while learning to become best sailors as we can be. We made a lot of research so that we would be sure to choose a solid boat that could take us through storms if needed to. Also we went to see for about 10 boats in Perth, some of them not even nearly what we were looking for, but good experience to see. There were so few boats available on the West Coast of Australia that we were super surprised when our paths crossed with our little Vellamo in July 2021. She was advertised online and was slightly out of our budget, but she was a true gem! She is an older boat, but launched 2007 and has had only a few owners since who have all been up to date with the maintenance. She was also properly equipped for longtime cruising and ready to cross oceans! We fell in love straight away.
We sacrificed space for sail-ability, but this thing flies to be such an old lady! Just cruising downwind in pretty rough seas against the breaking waves we average 6.5 knots. I can't wait to experience how she sails in calm seas! Also she has just enough space to accomodate a friend or two overnight and host small dinner parties, and we can't wait to offer that kind of experiences to our friends and family!
Here's a little tour of our home that is able to take us wherever we want to go: