Holiday is a 1980 Tartan 37 sailboat hull # 280. We bought her in October of 2013 and have been outfitting and improving her for live aboard cruising ever since. With our previous boat being a relatively tiny Catalina 22 with a 6 horsepower outboard, the learning curve has been large, and we are still on the very low slopes of it. We’ve learned all about things like stuffing boxes, rudder pintles, and oh yeah…40 horsepower diesel engine maintenance, to name a few. The whole sailing part is by far the easiest. Holiday is our floating home with all the comforts and amenities of our previous land based homes but with only a tiny fraction of the elbow room and the ability to take us on adventures to far off tropical places with just the power of the wind.
Tartans have a well deserved reputation for being ruggedly built with most of the 486 37s still roaming the oceans (even hull # 1 built in 1976). Multiple Tartan 37s have circumnavigated the globe as well as current on going circumnavigations. They also have an earned reputation of being fast and sailing well for boats their size. Something we can attest to as the poor sailors that we are, no longer always watching other boats fly by us when we are out on the water. Built with voyaging in mind, there is plenty of storage space for provisions to stay away from the dock for long stretches of time. Adding 300 watts of solar panels and limiting the amount of gadgets and gizmos, we plan to anchor out the majority of the time disconnected from the stress of our land based lives. Maybe catch a sunset or two and have fun on Holiday.