Hi, Jay, and group, This came in under the liveaboard label, so I trust I'm not stepping on Jay's toes, here, and what follows is a detailed discussion of a boat for sale, so if that's not your thing, feel free to move on...
----- Original Message ----- From: Jay Morgan To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 1:33 PM Subject: [Liveaboard] Morgan 462 cheep Hello Skip, I have been following the trails and tales of Flying Pig for quiet some time now. I must say that your adventures are ones that I dreaming of having with my wife (maybe not the first adventure). We currently own a Morgan 383 our second sailboat. We had a similar yet less costly event on our maiden voyage, running the bow rail into the dock trying to dock for the first time in 20 knot winds. Heh. A good rule of thumb is to not approach a dock at any speed higher than you're comfortable with hitting it :{)) This will be our 4th summer sailing in Lake Michigan out of Kenosha, Wisconsin. We both hope for the day and time that we can sever our land ties and move to the water. My wife would still like some place to settle on hard ground making our complete departure from land undoable for now. I hope our health can continue as we are both still very active 56 year olds. One of our latest plans is to find a cruising boat that needs a little work and start the renovation project. When completed we can hopefully climb aboard and sail into the sunset. In one of your many posts I read that you were familiar with many of the 46 Morgan's on the market. This was an old trail so I am not sure if you still follow the used boat market. If you are like me, I seem to find myself looking at boats way too often! I do, to both questions... You are unquestionably one of the foremost authorities on Morgan 46 boats so I would be grateful to get your opinion on a boat I was looking at. There is a Morgan 461 for sale in Ft. Lauderdale. Her name is Dolphin. The listing says she is a 462 however the picture clearly shows her as a single mast vessel so believe she is actually a 461. She has been on the hard for a while and needs some cosmetic work for sure. The price started at $99,000 and is now at $84,500 and might be had for less. There are a lot of features on the boat but I am not sure what condition they are in. This might be the project we are looking for at the right price. If this is a project boat (http://www.sailboatlistings.com/view/15313?), 84,5 is high in this market. I say that in part because a boat with which I was very familar (I helped the seller buy it from my surveyor's brother), an EXCELLENT example, sold in 2 weeks for 89,9 (listed for 99K). I'd also caution you on a project boat of any make/mark, as I refer to a(ny) boat as an onion - peel a layer, cry, rinse, repeat, until you get down to the good stuff. More on that in your last para, but, generally speaking, you'll want to buy the very best example you can find, and STILL expect to find lots of deferred maintenance. That said, if you're INTERESTED in a project boat and have the time and skills, most are cosmetic and labor-intensive, without undue material expense, to bring up to snuff. Knowing what I do, after our 3-year refit (which went very far afield from our original thoughts due to shoulder operations delaying our departure and the "while we're at it, why not xxx" syndrome), if I were bored (which I'm definitely not), I'd readily take on a project example if it were otherwise sound and could be bought at a substantially bargain price. As to the sloop aspects, the ketch rig was an extra cost option (see my morgan46info pages in my gallery). Most buyers opted for that, but there are several 462 sloops I know about. A giveaway, unavailable as an option, would be a boom gallows, standard on the 461s. If there are out-of-the-water pix, another unavailable feature of the 461s is an enclosed shaft through the cutlass bracket, which prevented bending them when charterers inevitably ran over a rope and did the archimedes screw trick with the prop as it wound around the shaft in front of the bracket (been there, done that, replaced the tranny plate which the transmission pulled out of, see review for instance in Moorings early on so I don't feel so stupid). Another telltale is the depth. Deep was an extra cost option, and most 462s didn't take it. If the draft's 5-3, it's a 462, as all the 461s were deep, at 6'. So, assuming that's the boat, it's a 462S, don't know about D/S cuz listing doesn't give draft but it appears shoal. No crutch, no tube. The listing isn't very informative in the YachtWorld style, so there's lots of other stuff which a broker would have put about the boat. However, there have been substantial, costly, improvements, as seen from the pix: New mast/electric furling, staysail (presuming it's properly anchored to the stem) with furler (claimed; I don't see one in the pix), a curiosity I don't appreciate (understand the purpose/function) of the aft chrome rails on the stern, semi-arch/davits with solar, 2 (??) watermakers, rub rail (not standard, and I don't even think it was a factory option - none of the 461s, e.g., came with them), New Found Metals or someone else' SS (NFM I THINK has levers, this has what looks to be turn handles) ports, life raft (don't know if it's current) deck winches aft of the originals on the cockpit, custom galley sink, either very costly alterations to the aft head/shower/tub, or a mod I wasn't aware as being available (never have seen a M46 without a bathtub and central located toilet), unless it's a very late example (date not given; abort that, it appears the url heading shows 81, which would put it in mid-run), it's possible that Morgan modified their aft head, as that's the design in the 463s - but one of the latest 462s I have been on, an 84 which had the bathtub, was standard. The Nav is non-standard, a nice finishing job, Bose speakers (have the same thing, not cheap), Icom IC-M802 and Pactor modem, obviously a cruiser from the two boards on the rails for jerricans, screens/shades in the salon hatches, new light fixtures (not all that expensive, but a lot of them add up) as seen from no rust/corrosion, and a KISS windgen... Lots of nice improvements which shouldn't need attention... I first got interested in the Morgan 46's thru the "Living the Cruising Dream" website and after reading their info I was sold on this boat. Liberty belongs to Ty and Suzanne Giesemann, who I imagine you are familiar with. Everything I have read about these boats has lead me to believe that for the price, they are the best value on the market for a solid roomy cruising boat. Liberty has had some significant changes to their master cabin and to the exterior that seem to be nice upgrades. What is your opinion on these changes and if they have changed this boat in any negative way? I drool over what they did with that boat. Having a very secure income made all the difference for what they did; I would not characterize any of the changes made as negative. There was a time a while ago, when the boat was in Turkey, where she could be bought (albeit very much more expensively than today's market). I'd expect that boat to be a Bristol example. My wife is not yet sold on the Morgan 46. She loves our 383 but her idea for a cruiser is to buy a pilothouse. They seem to be a lot more money than I would like to spend and I am not yet sold on the advantages to this type of boat. She likes the Nauticat 43's and 44"s which run close to $200,000 and more for an older boat. Any thoughts on pilothouse boats? Pilothouses have a lot to say for them. Colvin, a very well respected designer, is extremely negative about cockpits as a whole, for example. However, if you're anywhere close to that price range ability you could buy the very best example of any M46x you could find in the broker or private market. For us, the M46 is the perfect boat, as arrived at by my having boarded more than 200 (you'd have to go back a very long way to see and appreciate what we went through in our research and prep, but that was distilled from over 3000 listings and 300 targeted boats) different boats before settling on the type. Once that was done, it was a matter of seeking out all the M46s available at the time. We had an advantage in that there were 13 on YachtWorld, with 5 of them in the FL peninsula. We had an accepted offer in less time than it took me to even consider most of the boats before that time :{)) However, what makes a perfect boat for us may not fit for you. Our personal needs which drove our decision aside, M46 are, in the words of our surveyor, the Morgan Yacht's QC and Service Manager for the entire time of the production of M46x, the toughest of the already toughest boats, Morgans. Further, the 462s were 30000 DW, and the 461s 33000 DW. A little of that was the extra ballast in the (deep) keel, but the bulk of it was extra fiberglass. Our wreck is testament to how stout they are. You have to work extremely diligently to break one of them. 5000 or so impacts on a rock with 6-8' seas failed to do so, even to the extent that our keel dug a 2' hole in the solid limestone before she was salvaged and towed home on her own bottom with her own bilge pumps easily keeping up with the seepage from the core of a transducer's having been displaced being the only place of water intrusion. To a man, the two companies involved in the salvage expected to have to take it out on body bags (huge waterbed equivalent floatation bladders)... Skip thank you for you time and consideration. Best regards, Jay S. Morgan Executive Director South Barrington Park District 847-381-7515 847-381-2824 Fax My pleasure. L8R Skip Morgan 461 #2 SV Flying Pig KI4MPC See our galleries at www.justpickone.org/skip/gallery! Follow us at http://groups.google.com/group/flyingpiglog and/or http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheFlyingPigLog "Believe me, my young friend, there is *nothing*-absolutely nothing-half so much worth doing as simply messing, messing-about-in-boats; messing about in boats-or *with* boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not."
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