Outremer 5X

This was my favorite - the Outremer 5X. The Outremers of last century spearheaded the circumnavigation activities that multihulls were making and in my humble opinion had demonstrated the French sailors/designers were a force to be reckoned with. The company (Ultramare) is now under new management - but they believe in the same values that the original did - build strong, ocean going boats - and have now included liveaboard amenities. They are releasing a 45 footer from the factory soon - I believe that to be the top of our list, but a lot can happen in 5 years (our timeline to transitioning to life onboard a cat).

Gunboat

This is just plain ridiculous(ly nice). I need to win the lotto....

Antares 44

This one is clearly La's favorite (and I really like it as well). Strong boat that is built in Argentina and looks the part of a circumnavigator. This company also builds roughly four boats a year. As we make our career transition and start saving for one of these liveaboards, this will likely be one of the top three contenders.

Knysna 48

We bought tickets to the "Take the Wheel" program this year and got to ride on two of several boats. We picked the two larger catamarans so La could get a better idea of the ride and size of this class. The first one we rode was a Knysna 48 (the 'k' is silent - so "n-eyes-na" is the pronunciation I got). I had not heard of this builder before seeing this boat. They are out of South Africa and build about four boats a year. This one - "Meka of Tortula" was built in 2010 and is now up for sale if you have $600k in your pocket (which unfortunately I do not otherwise it might have transferred hands). Beautiful boat - and it sailed really well.

Annapolis Sailboat Show

So this was one of the reasons we went to Annapolis yesterday. We are scoping out the live aboard catamarans to see what we would like to target in the future (3-10 years from now). We also checked out the Island Packets - nice boats all around! Between La and I, we didn't converge to a singular solution - she loved the Leopards and I had a leaning towards the Antares; but there was no question the Gunboat 66 was the sweetest boat at the show. I'm pretty convinced the Farrier 44SC is still the boat for us, but being able to get a feel for the size and space of others did help answer a lot of questions for us.