"Offshore" has no actual definition. It isn't like buying a vessel for
high latitude winter cruising and making sure the ice class you buy is
equal to the ice you think you need to withstand, i.e. don't buy a boat
rated for 6 inches of ice if you are going to hit 12 inches.
So let us separate ability, performance, and comfort:
Most C&Cs, with obvious exceptions, can sail offshore and not sink. The
issue rarely will be that your boat breaks up and sinks before getting
into port. C&C made good boats and plenty of them have made plenty of
offshore passages. That said, remember these are old boats now and need
careful checking.
Most C&Cs are fast sailors. The big heavy tub contingent will say they
lose performance when carrying a heavy load while their boats do not.
That is true as far as it goes, but their boats are dog slow to start
with and even a loaded C&C is way faster than they are!
Comfort/room/stores is another issue, especially if this is also your
home. Most C&Cs are shallow bilge boats. This is good for speed, but
bilge water gets a lot of places. Imagine an old 12 Meter, the bilge
water is going to be way down there in the bilge unless the boat is
inverted. Our boats are mostly the opposite of that. We tend to be light
on storage and tankage too. I hold a whopping 18 gallons of fuel. Going
trans-Atlantic, that would keep the batteries up for a month but provide
no meaningful range under power. The boats were mostly not intended to
be world traveling live-aboards when new. C&Cs tend to be both fast and
light, which can really bang you around when pushing it. A couple days
rail down in 20 footers doing max speed was like an airplane crash that
never ended. Most cruisers don't push that hard and avoid that kind of
weather anyway, but once again comfort was not the number one design
criteria.
So if you want to sail the world's oceans and live on a boat, C&Cs are
mostly not optimized for that use. Plenty of retired people hanging
around on comfy Island Packets prove that out. But if you want to SAIL
while you do all that............. :)
Joe
Coquina
C&C 35 MK I
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