The Dream of Life Aboard

A dream of freedom on the water, countless questions – and a boat that wouldn't let us go.

The Dream That Held On

I can't remember the exact day I started dreaming about living aboard – it must have been quite some time ago.

I don’t even know how the idea first came to me. But it probably had something to do with the countless sailing books I’ve read over the years, and the fact that my parents introduced me to sailing pretty early on. And surely also with my tendency to prefer spending the night outside rather than in a boilding.

My partner needed a bit of time to warm up to the idea of this kind of life. But eventually, the excitement came – especially after our Lada Niva restoration project, which had started with great enthusiasm but ended rather unceremoniously. And since we felt that, after five years, it was probably time for a change of scenery anyway, the timing seemed right to revisit the whole “living on a boat” idea.

Endless questions

But is life aboard even practical for us? That was the question Laura, my partner, probably pondered the most – and the one I would have only asked myself after buying a boat. But of course, it had to be discussed. In detail.And along with it came all the inevitable follow-up questions: Where do we put all our stuff? How much can we actually fit on board? Do we really want to part with all those things? Not a trivial question – at the time, my biggest possessions included a full electronics workshop in the basement, half a car workshop in the garage, and a car full of tools for yacht electrical work. And if there’s one thing I truly struggle to get rid of, it’s tools.Laura, on the other hand, had several meters of bookshelf space filled with books she wasn’t exactly eager to part with either.

Then, of course, came the money question: Can we even afford this? And what if we don’t end up liking it? There’s no easy way back.What about working from the boat? Laura works remotely – would that even be productive and halfway ergonomic?

And surely there were many more questions – questions that, looking back now, have more or less faded into irrelevance.

At the end of all those discussions, we landed on one conclusion:“Okay, let’s give it a try. We’ll save up for a few more months – and then we’ll start looking at boats.”

Save money? We'd rather look at boats!

Saving and waiting have never exactly been my strong suits. So naturally, I found myself scrolling through classified ads in the evenings, looking at boats. And much to the detriment of our carefully laid-out plan, I immediately came across a few interesting boats…

But what were we actually looking for? We didn’t have a super concrete idea – just that it should be a boat around 40 feet, one we could live, work, and travel on. The fundamentals needed to be solid; I’d already been involved in several full refits in my life, and this one definitely wasn’t supposed to be another. Mainly, we wanted something that would allow us to focus on the kind of upgrades that make life and work on board actually possible – and comfortable.

How differently things would turn out… well, that’s another story. But first, I had to tell Laura about what I’d found. And one of the boats I showed her caught both of our attention right away – it was only an hour’s drive from us. So, we scheduled a visit with the owner and headed off to Rendsburg.

A Cutter, 11 Winches, and a Question Mark

So there we stood – next to an owner who had clearly been expecting older prospective buyers – in front of a boat that in no way matched what I would have described as my dream boat just a week earlier.

A cutter-rigged motorsailer with a fixed dodger – the kind of boat for which the word “cutter” must have been invented – had never been my idea of the perfect boat. Built in 1988 in Denmark, made of wood and covered in fiberglass, with a high freeboard, this boat gave off anything but the impression of being fast or sporty. And as for the technical equipment… there’s hardly anything worth mentioning – because there was almost nothing there at all.

And yet, there was something about this boat that excited us – beyond the things that tend to win me over far too easily anyway: like the 11 winches, the Aries windvane on the stern, a solid RIB on deck, and a gigantic chart table.

Yes, something about this boat seemed to say: “I’m exactly what you’ve been looking for!” Maybe it was the fully enclosed bulkheads that gave it a proper ship-like feel. The spacious U-shaped galley where you could probably cook in any weather.The two cozy pilot berths in the saloon.

Or maybe it was more a feeling of...well... a feeling of what, exactly?

Whatever it was, it left us both a little euphoric – and a little confused – as we wrapped up the viewing, walked back to the car, and somehow already felt certain: this would be a fantastic boat for what we had in mind.

But… we couldn’t possibly buy the very first boat we looked at, could we?

What happened next