Practical Boat Owner – May 2018

34 Practical Boat Owner t http://www.pbo.co.uk

BOATS

From eBay to

Rodney Bay

Pete Dearden describes

how he and his family

went from novice boat owners to

liveaboards who wound up sailing

the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers

A

s we adjusted our sails to

round Pigeon Island heading

for Rodney Bay and the fi nish

of the Atlantic Rally for

Cruisers (ARC) it was

inconceivable to imagine that just six

years earlier I’d started out with the

intention of just buying an old Hobie Cat.

It all started on a camping holiday with

my wife and two children in the Medoc

region of France. We’d hired a small

sporty little catamaran on Lake Hortin. It

was so much fun that I thought to myself

rather than just have a trailer to carry the

camping gear we could trail a Hobie and

use that to carry the camping gear as well.

This was not an idea that my wife Jan

was in favour of, but the children thought it

would be amazing. The cost to hire the

Hobie was high, so to own your own and

be able to spend days on the water rather

than a few hours made perfect sense to me.

You can imagine my shock as I tested

the market only to fi nd the cost of these

boats was astronomical. Even old models

requiring new sails and trampolines were

listed for thousands. Very disappointedly I

began the search for something which

would fi t our budget, or should I say my

budget, as Jan knew little of my market

research at this point.

It was a good nine months later, April

2011, having spent many an evening

searching boats for sale online and

repeatedly talking myself out of spending

money that I just didn’t have, that I spotted

Twenty 20 for sale on eBay. Its distinctive

solid sprayhood and canopy caught my

Pete Dearden

was born in

Darwen

Lancashire and

grew up on the

country verges of

Birmingham

• about as far
  away from the
  sea as you can
  get. His fi rst
  experience with
  sailing was in a dinghy singlehanded while
  on holiday in the Dominican Republic, but
  it was only while sailing Hobie Cats In
  France many years later that he realised
  he wanted to get a boat of his own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PART ONE