Email This Page to a FriendPreview: Thoughts On Acquiring A Boat, with Iain Oughtred

– [Narrator] Buying a boat can be an overwhelming endeavor. Where do you even begin? Matching the right boat with the right person is something boat designers thrive on. We asked world-renown small boat designer Iain Oughtred. How does someone find the right boat?

– There’s so many boats out there. Everywhere you go there’s loads and loads of different boats

– Right.

– doing different things for different reasons, why? Why are they all so different?

– Sure.

– What are they supposed to be looking for? What I would think was the thing to do would be to, you don’t look at plans catalog or whatever, boats for sale so much as what you do there as well but mainly you gotta just look at the actual boats. Travel around and see the boats wherever you can find them and then talk to the owners, see what they like about this boat. What’s good about this boat? What’s so great about it? Why do you have a boat like this?

– Right.

– What’s wrong with this other boat? Why don’t you have one like that? Then you talk to the owners of the other boat and they might say, “This is the boat you want.

– Yeah right. “You want one of these because because because “it’s got this it’s got that.” Maybe those reasons are less relevant or, but anyway what you do is you spend your time doing this seeing all the boats you can sailing them if you can, talk to the owners the owners generally nearly always are very helpful in wanting to explain how the boat works and what’s good about the boat and

– Right.

– why they should have one why they shouldn’t have one. All along of course you’ve got in the back of your mind your own particular purpose what you wanna do with a boat, whether you’re sailing single-handed or with one or two people or occasionally half a dozen people or, and hopefully in time you spend enough time doing this and you get a pretty clear idea of what boats there are and which ones you’ll get a sense of some boat you think “This is really nice, that looks like the thing I want,” and while some other boat might do all the same things just as well but you don’t like the look of the boat or.

– Right.

– It can get very subjective. You’re getting an idea of what kinda boat you want you’ve seen all these boats, and then you gotta decide whether you want to build a boat, might be a different situation to whether you want to buy a secondhand boat or have a new boat built, and probably it’s better to whether you’re building a boat it’s quite a big investment time and energy and money, having a boat built by a professional builder, serious investment in money especially. Before you do that you need to be very clear exactly what you want, so maybe if you’re not that clear you haven’t got that definite idea of exactly what you want then what you need to do is you buy a secondhand boat. You find the best one you can that’s nearest to what you wanna do, sail a boat for season, six months a year whatever and that will help to clarify perhaps better than anything exactly and it can help you to sort out your ideas what you need, and maybe when you’ve done that, you might buy another secondhand different kind of boat try that see how that works,

– Right.

– where the hell that fits. Maybe then you’ve got exactly what you want you can go to your boat builder or you can buy a set of plans build your boat get a kid whatever, and set yourself up with the right boat for your purpose.

– Right.