Dimensions
LOA: 47' 8"
LWL: 40' 2"
Beam: 14' 8"
Displacement: 35,000 lbs
Draft: 6'
Bridge Clearance: 68' (and they mean it! Sten will never let me live down taking her under a bridge with a 67' clearance. The tide was low -- we had at least a foot of clearance (I hope)!)
Ballast: 11,675 lbs iron

Engine
62 HP Yanmar engine, model 4JH2-TE
Cruising Speed: 6kts at 2500rpm, but she'll do 7kts at 3000rpm

Tankage
Fuel: 160 gals (2 steel tanks -- or so the listing said -- they are black iron and may cause us some trouble down the line).
Water: 150 gals (She came with two stainless steel tanks totaling 200 gals, but we've removed the smaller 75 gallon tank to install our Spectra watermaker under the salon settee and replaced it with a 25 gallon tank).
Holding: 30 gals (1 tank)

What does that mean for us? That she is roomy and seakindly, if a bit slow, with plenty of fuel and water tankage to allow us to travel long distances.

Let's take a tour below deck

Let's start in the bow (most forward part) of the boat. The forecabin has a double v-berth with two large drawers below. My super crafty sister, Alena, outfitted this berth, and all of the others, with new mattresses. Aft (further back) and to starboard (right side of the boat) of the berth is a stack of drawers with a mirror and cabinet above followed by a full-height hanging locker. There is a large hatch overhead to let the breeze flow through. This whole area is closed off with a privacy door. This is our most comfortable guest cabin. There is ample room to stand and change clothes here.

Next aft and to starboard is the forward head (bathroom) with a shower. This used to be the "stinky" head. But we've replaced the toilets in both heads and the hoses throughout the boat, so we hope to have eradicated the stink. We expect that we will use this head as a wet locker for our foul weather gear when we are offshore. Eventually, if we get far enough off the beaten path, we may also set up temporary storage in it for food stuffs when we need to provision for months at a time.

Opposite and to port (left side of the boat) is a sliding door to a cabin with two single berths outboard (over and under) a hanging locker forward and a mirrored dresser with drawers aft. We'll use these berths as sea berths when we are offshore. The narrowness of the berth makes for more comfortable sleeping when the boat is heeled over to port than our centerline queen in the aft stateroom. There is also a nice sized hatch overhead in this stateroom, which lets in some decent airflow (except offshore, when our dingy is stored on deck above it).

In the main salon is a very large semi-circular settee to port with an interesting dining table top that folds back in half lengthwise to create two smaller tables, one of which is a small café-style table with built-in drink holders. These drink holders are super handy for keeping drinks from spilling when we are underway.

When we bought the boat, the settee was covered with a parrot patterned fabric that gave me nightmares.

See, even Lenore looks scared. With the red lights on at night to preserve our night vision, their little beady eyes would follow us around the cabin. But no worries -- the parrots have been banished.

My sister, Alena, has refit our salon settee with very luxe cushions. They are covered in Sensuede, which is the most durable version of ultrasuede that we could find. The foam in the seat bottom cushions is six inch latex from www.foambymail.com. The back cushions are a 4 inch medium density foam from www.foamrubber.com -- the same stuff Ethan Allen uses for its furniture. The end result is super comfy, and we're so thankful to Alena for taking on this project.

Above the settee and outboard are two long bookshelves with fiddles, one over top of the other, followed by a space that held the prior owner's TV/VCR and the stereos. We've ditched the TV and stereo (planning to use our laptops to watch DVDs and hope to get an Ipod for music), so now we've got some extra space to play with.

Aft of the settee is a bulkhead with an access door to the engine room which has a full height section on the port side as well as the half-height section below the companionway. Many boats have the engine under the salon floor. And we looked at one Tayana 52 that had an island counter in the middle of the salon that housed the engine.

A real engine room was one of the most important features for us when looking at boats -- Sten wanted a good sized engine room that he could actually work in. And for me, the ability to keep the dirt and chaos of engine maintenance and repairs contained, rather than have it spread all over my living room, was just as important.

On the starboard side of the salon, across from the settee and dining table, is a forward-facing navigation station with a good-sized chart table and a cushioned seat (which Alena also redid). We've replaced most of the instruments in the nav station, including installing a new Icom M802 SSB and Pactor II modem (with Pactor III upgrade) from Gary Jensen at www.docksideradio.com. Gary also handled getting our ship station license from the FCC for us and advised us on some installation issues.

The SSB and Pactor modem will enable us to have email access from the remotest of places. The Icom M600 SSB that came with the boat would have let us have voice access to the radio nets, but was too outdated for email. It was important to us to be able to communicate with friends and family at home, so we've upgraded (to the tune of $4K -- but that's just how much we love you guys). My dad, who has had a latent interest in ham radio for years, adopted the old SSB, and will be installing his own communications station (if mom lets him put a huge antenna on the side of the house!) so that we can talk via the radio.

Sten's mom generously bought us an Iridium satellite phone so that we could have voice communications with people who did not have a high frequency radio. The phone lives in a cradle in the nav station. We've also replaced the old Vhf radio with an Icom M602 Vhf/Hailer Transceiver, and the old GPS with a new unit.

Just behind the navigation station, at the forward end of the galley, are racks built into the cabin top for chart storage.

Aft of the navigation station is the galley which continues into the walkthrough to the master cabin aft. The galley begins forward on the outboard side with double stainless steel sinks, with cutting-board covers, set into a white Formica counter top followed by the three-burner propane stove and oven, and then the refrigeration and freezer units. These are both top-opening, creating more work surface area, but the refrigeration unit is also front-opening. We've added a water filter and a soap pump next to the sink.

We're still struggling with what to do with our trash. We don't want to give up our storage space under the sink. We've considered installing trash receptacles in the countertop, but we would like to replace the Formica top first. So for now the trash hangs in a bag on hooks set into the companionway stairs.

Most aft in the galley on the outboard side is a full-height pantry locker. The shelves in this unit are super deep. To make the space more useable, we considered installing pantry drawers on bottom-mounted gliders, but our cabinet-maker friend Jeremy advised us that they weren't rated for such heavy weights. So this is a project that we've tabled for now.

The inboard side of the galley, across from the sink, has a wood-surfaced counter top with a built-in microwave oven at eye-level, followed by two more storage cabinets. The Tayana does not feel as room down below as modern production boats (such as a Catalina, Hunter, Bennetau, etc), but that is in large part due to all of the storage. For weekend cruising or week long charters, so much storage space wouldn't be necessary. But start imagining moving your whole life aboard, and you'll start to understand why I'm so focused on the storage.

Below the counter top inboard is more access to the engine room. This is where Sten taught me to change a fuel filter. Who would have believed it?

Most aft is the large and luxurious master cabin (sing it with me -- a deluxe apartment in the sky). It features a centerline queen-sized berth with four large drawers below it. When we were boat shopping, it was important to us to find a boat where we didn't have to crawl over each other to get in and out of bed.

Behind the drawers, below the berth, are the water tanks. When they are too full, we hear them sloshing below us when the boat rolls at anchor. So, I expect that we'll not fill them completely, unless we are heading offshore.

At the head of the berth is a panel that allows us access to the emergency tiller. But just in case my mom is reading this, we won't talk about why that might be necessary. This area also contains our SSB tuner, access to both autopilots (they steer the boat for us), and a bit more storage space.

On either side of the berth there is a semi-circular cushioned chair, and aft of each chair is a night-table surface with two curved shelves and a cabinet above and outboard. Lenore thinks these cabinets are an awfully good place to hide when we are underway.

On the starboard side forward of the chair is a large hanging locker. Forward on the centerline is a vanity with a cushioned stool and a large mirror. If you've read this far, you can probably guess what's coming next: Alena redid the cushion on the vanity stool and chairs (which are pretty cozy) in more of that luscious sensuede, as well as the mattress. I don't expect that we'll use this as a vanity (Sten just doesn't take that long to do his hair). We may use it as a second desk area (the nav station being the first).

Forward on the port side is a hanging locker with a single door and then the entrance to the ensuite head, which features a small soaking tub most forward and separate from the head and vanity section. Seriously, we almost didn't buy the boat because of the tub. It seems pretty silly now, but when we looked at boats one dismal winter day in Rhode Island, one of them had a tub – and it was filled with dead flies. That image was almost enough to keep us from flying down to Tortola to check out the boat formerly known as Belles Annees.

Why this boat?

First, let's talk about the Benjamins. Sailors talk about money in terms of boat units, and joke that "BOAT" stands for "Bring On Another Thousand." Sten wanted our boat unit to be $500. But really, it is probably more like $2,000. This cruising nonsense is expensive. When we first hatched this crazy plan to circumnavigate, we had no idea what it would cost. One cruising adage is that it costs what you've got. And in our case, that has proven true (and we haven't even left the dock yet. Please God, someone buy our house . . .).

You want to buy the safest, fastest, most comfortable boat you can afford. If you've spent enough time around boats, you know that some of these characteristics are diametrically opposed. So, you figure out what you can spend, and you go find the boat that meets each of these characteristics, to some extent.

While on our honeymoon in French Polynesia during the summer of 2004, we spent a lot of time watching the activity on a boat named Swany that was anchored in front of our bungalow in Rangiroa. Its sailcover had the following web address on it: Swany.no. Returning to the States, we began following Swany's adventures on-line as it cruised from the Tuamutos on down to New Zealand. Throughout that winter we followed their adventures, and started to research what it would cost us to do something similar.

We quickly fell in love with a Hallberg Rassey 49 for $275K, that needed about $25K of outfitting (or at least that's what we thought, knowing what we know now, we'd budget $75K for refitting/outfitting that boat), but couldn't afford it. So we ratcheted down our target purchase price to $150K, with the expectation that we would spend between $50K and $75K on the refit/ outfitting because in our size and price range we were looking at older, well worn boats with good bones. So our purchase/refit/outfitting budget let's call this the "sailaway price") would be $200K - $225K.

In April of 2005 we engaged the counsel of a wonderful broker, David Walters, who formerly was one of the partners in Shannon Yachts, and the designer and owner of Cambria (glorious boats). David also happens to be the father of Sten's friend Chris.

We approached David with a list of ideas based on Sten's schooling in New England boats (he used to work for Little Harbor) and our research in books and online. The models we suggested included the Halberg Rassey 43 and 49, Bristol 45.5, Stevens 47, C&C 48, Peterson 44, and Gulfstar 50. David added additional ideas to our list, including the Hylas 44, Ta-Shing Orion 50, Wauquiez 47, Taswell, and Tayana 47, 48 and 52. We looked at many of these boats in person, and learned something from crawling through each of them.

David steered us towards several boats in our sailaway price range, but we quickly figured out that the work we would have to do to get them ready to go offshore would take much longer than our target departure date permitted. At that point we were still planning to leave in the Fall of 2005 (in hindsight, we realize that this was pretty foolish). So we revised our sailaway price range to $250K - $275K.

Belles Annees, a Tayana 47 located in Tortola, BVI, was well priced for her age, condition and equipment. So we put in an offer, contingent upon a sea trial and survey. The weekend of our first anniversary, we flew to Tortola to check her out. By early July we had closed on the boat, lined up insurance (through IMIS - www.imiscorp.net ) found a delivery skipper and crew, and were waiting for the right weather window to bring her back to New England for the refit.

We hoped to wind up on the bottom end of our sailaway price range, but our final sailaway price will probably be closer to $325k, of which approximately 60% represents the purchase price of the boat. It is an obscene number, isn't it?

Although we did our research, we completely underestimated the budget impact of purchasing an older boat and one in this size range. We struggled to find accurate information about budgets and costs. However, there are some very useful discussions on the Seven Seas Cruising Association Discussion Board http://64.70.221.24/DiscBoard/ and in Beth Leondard's Voyager's Handbook. Unfortunately, we didn't receive our copy until just before we flew down to Tortola for the delivery run. I wish that I had it much earlier in the process. The best source of budget info we had was the website of a pair of cruisers who were willing to share everything -- the good, the bad, and the horribly embarrassing -- Pat and Ali aboard Bumfuzzle.

When we bought Belles Annees, and began planning the refit that would turn her into Mata'irea, one thing that we certainly hadn't planned on was replacing so much of the equipment that came with our boat. This has had a huge impact on our budget. So if you can, don't pay extra for a boat that has an SSB or GPS. You will likely want to replace the older electronics with newer models anyway. So why pay for something twice?

After reading Voyager's Handbook, we went from estimating an annual cruising budget of about $20K, to assuming that we will spend $35K per year during the 3-5 years that we are out cruising. The primary difference is in the portion set aside for maintenance and repairs.

We ultimately dealt with these budget shifts by deciding to stay at our jobs for an extra year before taking off on our sabbatical. The additional time allowed us to build up the cruising kitty a bit. It also gave us time to do a good portion of the refit work ourselves.

As our trip progresses, we'll attempt to provide regular updates about our budget with the intent of helping others who are thinking about spending some time cruising.