The Saturday Past

This weekend past we went to South Haven, MI to look at a Watkins 36 sailboat that I am interested in. The day dawned with brilliant, clear skies and a temperature of 35F. We made the long trek to SH and to the property that the boat is resting on. It looks huge and has a brown canopy that covers the entire boat. Surprisingly, she is in the water and appears to have been all winter – there is a bubble machine that keeps the ice away.

Down inside there is plenty of room and it has one of those double hulls that makes it difficult to look around in the nooks & cranny’s. SAM managed to find most of the openings and we took our liesure and checked out most of the areas. The boat needs a little TLC on the wood parts and a good clean but seems to be in pretty good shape.

The layout inside is unique but we liked it. There are two staterooms and both can be isolated from the salon. The aft SR connects thru a door to the head and thru another to the kitchen. Both the head and kitchen exit into the salon but the head has a door for privacy. The salon has a big hatch that slides open so the front stateroom users can exit to the deck & not bother the aft people. Cool huh. The forward SR is the standard V-berth and the salon can be set up to accomodate another 3 persons but I would not want to sale with a complement of 7 people for very long.

The systems are somewhat more complicated but it has hot/cold pressure water, 4 burner propane stove & oven, head with shower, tv, stereo, radar, depth guages, speed/log, etc. Strangely, it has no heater or aircon. I guess that will have to change. Unfortunately, there are no pictures yet. Moore later……….

In addition, we did three geocaches – two were in the town and one was on a trail about 1/2 mile into a nice wooded area (and out of the wind).