moving to Facebook

See updates at facebook

Best time to do a deal!

2015 Sailing Season is winding down in the inland northwest.  This can be one of the best times of the year to buy a sailboat.  Sellers are looking at storage costs, winterization and for a little effort on a buyer's part, one can often make attractive deals.

For the same reasons, if you are considering selling your quality sailboat, we have sold a lot of sailboats and we need listings.   Please contact me at: pete@sailmontana.com to discuss listing your sailboat.

Video of Tuesday Night Race at North Flathead YC

A cool video shot by Trevon Baker Photography via drone of Tuesday Night Race at NFYC:

features Sail Montana's racing sailboat "Sabrosa" USA 113 at 7:40


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7D0bAX15UI

Nice job Trevon!

Road Trippin

Stuff goin' on:

Alan Bock and crew from Helena, MT entered in 2015 Swiftsure International Yacht Race. Crew are the Abelin boys from Bozeman, all three including Dad Terry Abelin.  Sail that Bene 36.7 "Chatterbox" like you stole it!

Tim Sauer and crew from Billings, MT will be competing in the 2015 J24 National Championships in San Francisco over Memorial Day weekend in Sail Montana's J24 "Garage Sail" sponsored by Billings Dairy Queen and Sail Montana.  I'll be in San Francisco for a few days helping the Garage Sail Racing team get tuned up.  As Mark Twain famously said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco", so bringing the warm stuff.

I've been on the road a fair bit recently:

J100 Brilliant at her new home in Olympia, WA.  Delivery by Sail Montana

Tartan 31 on her way to her new home in Montana. Delivery by Sail Montana

Sail Montana's Hendo 30 "Sabrosa"

Work is coming along on Sail Montana's Henderson 30 "Sabrosa"

So far: 

- new traveler track and car from Harken

- new clutches and deck organizers from Spinlock

- new backstay from Bill Fastiggi at Vermont Sailing Partners - one heck of a nice guy

- new main battens and backstay flicker from the guys at RBS, whose motto is RBS is better than your BS! - ain't it the truth...

- all new Samson running rigging

- new mainsheet system using Harken Carbo 

- shout out to Ballard Sails for help on the class main and lifelines

- cool LED lighting (interior and nav) 

- for whatever reason the boat did not come with mooring cleats, I guess she's too fast to tie down, but we've added a couple and relocated the aft spinn blocks

Checked out the water over the weekend,  it's cold.

Sail Montana joins forces with Sail Northwest

It was bound to happen sooner or later, and now it is official.  My good friend Bob Ross and I sat down for a few minutes last week and agreed that it would make sense for everyone involved if we worked together to provide a new level of service in the yacht sales business in the inland northwest.

I will continue to serve yacht buyers and sellers in Idaho, Montana, eastern Washington, eastern BC and Alberta but will do so utilizing the capabilities of a well respected, full service yacht brokerage.

For current yacht listings see: SAIL NORTHWEST

For assistance with buying or selling a yacht in eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, eastern BC or Alberta, please email Pete Sauer at Sail Montana.

Sabrosa arrives in Montana

So we sold our J24 "B4G" (Bound 4 Glory) of 20 years and began the search for something new and exciting to sail on Flathead  Lake.  There were a number of criteria involved in the search:

- has to be budget friendly, we only sail for three months a year here in Montana.  Not going to spend a fortune. Ideally we would use proceeds from the sale of B4G to buy the next boat.

- has to be fast. As Bill Lee says, Fast is Fun! J24's all go the same speed, which is fine if you are one-design racing, but we only have a few J24's left in the area, so we primarily sail under PHRF.  If you're gonna sail in a handicap fleet, you may as well be on a fast boat that is fun to sail, which in modern day terms means sport boat - huge kite on a retractable sprit for downwind excitement.

- has to be able to go low downwind.  That's generally a problem for sport boats.  They go fast across the wind (reaching) but when it's time to go low, they struggle (main covers up the kite). Got to figure out a way to make a sport boat competitive in windward/leeward courses.

- has to be able to carry a genoa.  A lot of our sailing is done in dying moderate breeze. Going fast helps the situation because you finish sooner and therefore more of a race is completed in the stronger breeze.  A lot of fast, fun boats are designed for higher wind speeds and therefore are designed to carry only a jib - gotta carry a genoa to keep the boat moving in the lighter stuff.

- larger cockpit. It's America - bigger is better.  Many sailboats have small cockpits with barely enough room for the working crew and little room for anyone else. If you want to bring along a few newbies to show them why you're addicted to this all-consuming sport, your guests need to either ride on the cabin top and duck every five minutes and try to stay out of the way of the crew who are trying to do their jobs in a small space, or your guests can ride down in the cabin...decidedly not fun.

- easier to rig and tow.  Getting kind of tired of tongue extensions for launching and boats whose hull bottom when on the trailer is higher than the top of my truck! Kinda tired of gin poles to raise the mast.

Every boat is a compromise.  A racing sport boat is going to be a tad uncomfortable to overnight on.  Tough to brew the morning coffee as well. Heck, tough in a nature call situation at times... but you've got to give a little to get a little.  

So in summary, the perfect boat for us, right here, right now is...drum roll please.... Sabrosa, a Henderson 30 - she fits all the criteria above:

- relatively cost effective in that the previous owner really tricked her out with all new sails, new aluminum road trailer, rigging and hardware, complete wireless instrument package, slick bottom job, new rudder and carbon tiller, even a new motor.  But alas life changes and he needed to sell before winter.

- she's fast. PHRF rates her at 45.  For those in the know, that's fast for a 30'er. She'll plane with the kite in 15 knots of breeze - should be exciting.

- she's designed to carry a genoa for those dying breeze races

- she has a nifty articulating bow sprit which sounds complicated, but in fact is as simple as letting one line out a bit and pulling in on another.  She still won't go dead downwind, but she'll go 165 which is close enough for me.

- she has a huge cockpit - 9' x 15' cockpit - bigger than my living room - as my good friend Billy Corwin says, "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing!" We got room for everybody, and there's  a lot of lines to pull, so there's something for all those people to do as well.

- she's easy to tow. I hauled her from Newport, RI to Montana myself (thats a whole other story) - tows like a dream... really...a dream.  I've towed sailboats to California, Texas, East Coast, West Coast and everything in between, even Mexico and Canada.  Towing wide, high, tippy loads (see the story below regarding my last sailboat) is really not that fun.  All up towing weight for the Henderson 30 is just over 5000 lbs on her aluminum trailer, about the same as a J24 with a steel trailer, except that she sits low on the trailer like a big ski boat, keel retracted through the deck. She looks cool and fast just sitting there. The all carbon mast can be stepped by hand (no gin pole required) in the parking lot.  

So here are a couple photos of Sabrosa (which by the way is Spanish for "tasty" or "delicious" but can also imply a certain level of hotness...)

Sailing in Rhode Island summer 2014

Going for a ride in the Caribbean by the original owner, who was the builder.

We are all going to learn how to sail her together - should be a fun summer!  Arriva!

Headed west, way west...crossing the continental divide

RIP (Rest in Pieces) Bound 4 Glory

Time to say good bye to an old friend:

Sail Montana's own J24 USA 3845 "Bound 4 Glory" (B4G) ex-"Jungle Love" was sold last May to some folks in Chicago, IL looking for an above average condition J24.  Anyone who sailed on her or against her knew that she was certainly in above average condition.  We packed her up and headed to Bozeman, MT where I met the professional haulers who took her from there.

B4G headed to Chicago via Swan Highway

Late that night I received a call from a very distraught truck driver saying that the boat had just been in an accident on I90 in a hail storm.

Screen Shot of Storm Cell Moving South to North across I90 at 11:10pm.  B4G was wrecked minutes before this photo was taken

She rolled 360 degrees, and wiped everything off of the deck, suffering major damage port side deck,  bulkhead and keel.  As can be seen in the photo, she separated from her trailer, and the trailer separated from the truck.

Thankfully we had secured cargo insurance for full value in addition to towing and disposal.  The new owners were made whole within days.  This could easily have turned out quite differently!