A choice here a choice there...

Yeah, this makes all kinds of sense, out of the mind of a 7th grader (all of a sudden a whole lot of our country's problems become crystal clear), and a conundrum you might want to consider...

When you think about it, the whole sailing off into the sunset/sunrise gig, is the result of a plethora of decisions and most everyone of them a compromise of sorts.

Deciding what boat to get, how to fit it out, and which direction to point the boat in, are all complicated and often problematic decisions and, no matter how well you research, there really is no simply right way to go...

Here at Boat Bits Central, we get a lot of email asking stuff like the right choice of boat, which GPS to get, or where to go in the Caribbean...

I do realize that our answers seldom satisfy. It's not we don't want to help, it's just that we don't quite see stuff (in general) in those "what's best" sort of terms.

On the other hand,  just think for a moment how cool it is to be able to make choices all by yourself! Sure, you want a good boat but if you have to have the sort of boat that someone tells you to get... Well, not a whole lot of freedom in that decision is there?

Freedom's cool but it does come with a price tag...

Read a few books (the new book by Fatty Goodlander has an excellent section on buying a boat), do a little independent research, do a little sailing on other folks boats so you can make an informed decision and then hit Craiggers or the local dock and see what's available in your budget niche and go for it... Not really hard at all!

The thing is there are really very few wrong decisions you can make... Let's say you're deciding whether to buy a Columbia 34 or a Flicka. Either boat will take you pretty much anywhere you would want to go in some comfort so go for it. Six months down the line, if you find the Flicka a bit cramped, sell it and buy something else... Hell, maybe the guy who bought the Columbia 34 has decided that he'd rather have a minimal envelope cruiser and what he'd really like would be a Flicka... Stranger things have happened!

The hard part of freedom is that  you always have a chance of getting it wrong, which is why, we tend to point people to cheaper rather than expensive options... Buy a Columbia 34 for $10K and a year later if you're unhappy with it you can sell it for around $10K, on the other hand if you'd spent $350K for a Bendytoy it's a whole different thing. Old boats have the advantage of already being depreciated to the Nth degree so they don't lose what value they have.

Listening to The Offspring

So it goes...