The Boat
Our boat, Nagambie, is Hull #30 of NEEL Trimaran’s 47 model. She’s a beamy 27’ wide gal with more space than we can sanely fill with stuff!
She’s comfortable for our family, sturdy and well-built and can sail like nobody’s business.
The view of the Nagambie cottage taken from the end of the jetty. You can’t actually see the cottage for the trees.
Why did we name our boat “Nagambie”
Ian’s family has a cottage about 2 hours’ drive inland from Melbourne. It was built in the 30’s by Ian’s great grandfather, Arthur Pearson, out of asbestos sheets transported to Turner Island on a tiny rowboat. In fact, everything for the house came via that same rowboat, including the circa 1950’s bench top gas cooker and the propane fridge of similar vintage.
Ian has wonderful memories of many childhood summers spent at the cottage, with its jetty sticking out into the warm & lazy Golburn river; perfect for generations of Pearson (Maddocks) children performing cannonballs. Because its position on the Golburn is barely downstream from the town of Nagambie, the family has referred to the cottage as “Nagambie” for as long as Ian can remember.
Having spent a number of idyllic days and nights there with Ian’s father and our children, Nagambie is now making wonderful memories for the fifth generation of Arthur Pearson’s family. With no electricity, It’s a place of peaceful refuge for all of us. We love its leaky tin roof, creaky old wooden floor with gaps large enough to see the ground below, and its resident sausage-eating kookaburra.
When we were considering names for the boat, “Nagambie” kept coming up. We wanted our boat to be about quality family time, a place of peace and refuge from the over-busy world and a place to form deeper connections with our kids. We discovered that “Nagambie” is a word from the Taungurung people meaning “lagoon” or “peaceful/still waters”. That was when we knew it was the perfect name for our boat.
Another NEEL 47 on the production line.
Why did we choose the boat that we did?
We are privileged to have a healthy budget. Definitely not a Gunboat or X-Yachts budget, but one that meant we could buy new if we wanted. Living in the middle of the North American plains means we are nowhere near even a single marina, so buying used, especially the kind of boat we wanted - a solid, safe, speedy family cruising boat, would mean lots of expensive air travel, eating into our boat budget.
We spent a lot of time researching boats from afar. We are both pretty relentless when it comes to researching items of interest and are both usually researching something. It just so happens that for a few years we were both researching boats. Every day. For hours. There’s only so far you can get in your decision-making online though, especially as we had never owned a boat before.
Eventually, we had to actually get on some real live boats. When Ian was helping a friend sail north up the Sea of Cortez in June 2019 they met a couple who were really happy on their new boat. That boat was a Seawind 1160, and Ian fell in love with it. After sailing for days in +30c weather on a Nauticat (Built for the chilly north), he especially loved the open and breezy nature of the catamaran.
So we called the closest Seawind dealer to us, in Seattle, and arranged to board a 1260 with them at the beginning of August. We immediately loved her. Zippy, comfortable, clean. We were pretty close to buying one when that shoulder-angel of reason that is frequently on holiday when we need her, whispered that we should probably see a few more boats first.
So we booked our tickets to the 2019 US Sailboat Show in Annapolis. We headed to Annapolis with the intention of getting on as many different boats as possible.
We had a shortlist of boats we really wanted to see, and a longer list of boats we kinda wanted to see. In all, we probably got on, and asked questions about, 40-50 boats over 3 days. We got on the ones on our shortlist, lots that hadn’t made the cut and lots that were not even on our radar for various reasons. We even got on a boat that our research convinced us we wouldn’t like. In fact it was the first boat we got on. It is also the boat we ended up buying. It all goes to show that actually getting on and talking to people who have sailed the actual boat you are interested in is so much more helpful than reading, or watching, internet reviews, especially those by folks who haven’t spent any time on one. The only thing that is more helpful is getting a chance to sail it yourself.
So, now that you have the backstory, what was our decision-making process? It was about what you'd expect from a lawyer and an accountant. There were spreadsheets. There were weighted scores. There was data about speed, and heel, and just about anything that could be quantified.
Before we get into the spreadsheet, it's important to note we decided not to include any monohulls, for various reasons that are mostly personal preference. If you’d like to know more about that, see the post “Multihulls versus Monohulls”.
Our top three contenders after the boat show included one we expected (Seawind 1260), one that wasn’t on our radar until the show (Nautitech 40/46), and one that we had discounted entirely before we got to the show (NEEL 47).