Downsizing. It’s what you do when your children leave home or when you retire. You decide to move to a smaller house and buy a smaller car. It’s also what many sailors do. That ocean-crossing 40-footer is never going to make a suitable boat for short cruises or daysailing, the cost apart, so are you just going to get something the same only smaller? Or make a radical change in the way you sail?
In my case my boats have ranged in size from 10ft to 42ft. Their growth might be arithmetic. In feet mine have been 10, 12, 14, 32, 36, 28, 34, 42 and now 26. Meanwhile their cost is more logarithmic, from a hundred pounds or less to multi-thousand.
My last boat, a Rob Humphreys-designed Yachting World 42 called Firefly, crossed the Atlantic twice, cruised the Caribbean for two seasons and, after I sold her, completed a circumnavigation. When I retired I decided that I wanted something simple, a comfortable daysailer.
Downsizing should also mean simplifying. Treat that word ‘should’ with great caution. Over-simplification doesn’t just make a boat easier to sail, if it’s overdone it might just also make it boring.
