I talked to a lot of people who didn’t go to the Annapolis boat show. “I didn’t want to be tempted by another boat,” one told me. “I hate walking on boats I can’t afford. I get jealous and sad” said another. “It makes me feel like my boat isn’t good enough.”

There’s a saying that the best way to learn to sail (and cruise) is on OPBs. Other people’s boats. You get all the joys with none of the responsibility, financial or otherwise. So does that mean that when you buy a boat and are no longer in the market it’s time to stop going on OPBs?

I think there are tons of great reasons to go to boat shows and walk on boats, even if you can’t afford them. Every boat, no matter the size, has cool stuff that makes life afloat a little better - why not steal ideas be inspired?

Calypso, as I’ve mentioned a few million times on this blog, is a small boat. At 28’, her length is smaller than the beam of some of the newer large catamarans (slight exaggeration, but only slight). It’s easy to think we should be looking for a larger boat. Jeremy has long loved the Ovnis; when we were offered the chance to go for an afternoon sail on the Cigale 16 that was one of the contenders for Cruising World’s Boat of the Year contest, we jumped at it. (Cigale is made by Alubat, which also makes the Ovni.)

At first I was a bit worried. Would we go for a sail and come back to find Calypso wanting? Would it be a case of tempting ourselves into unhappiness?

I took a lot of photos of the boat from the side and from the bow looking aft, but deleted them all before I could even write this blog post. There was no sense of scale - all you saw was a large expanse of deck. I can make our boat look that large by tweaking the zoom.

We had a glorious afternoon sailing from Annapolis north under the Bay Bridge and back down. A 56’ boat is waaaaay bigger than Calypso (duh), and while parts of that were lovely, we didn’t come back talking about how much we wanted something larger. On the contrary, spending the afternoon sailing on the Cigale made us very much appreciate what we have.

Sure, the boat sails smoothly. It was fun to be up high, standing on the back deck watching the wake bubble behind us. A wheel is a shift from the tiller we have; steering with 2 fingers was pretty cool.

One of the big things we noticed though was just plain how much WORK it is to take that boat out. The winches are all electric - and no, you really can’t just muscle your way around sails. The mast is something like 80 feet high - almost twice that of Calypso. Hauling up a sail is endless when you’re doing it by hand. Tacking is exhausting. The boom was so high off the deck that when we were bringing down the mainsail, David (the owner), who is a couple of inches taller than Jeremy, had to use an extended boat hook AND stand on winches to haul down the head. I was worried when we tacked that I’d screw up and blow out the sail by not releasing it early enough. The forces are huge.

There wasn’t a ton of wind, and Jeremy felt that the boat wasn’t likely being sailed as well as it could have been. Still, the highest boat speed we saw was 9 knots. And when we were coming back into Annapolis, the schooner Woodwind was absolutely hosing us. Maybe they had an engine on? Didn’t look like it.

It really was a total treat to go sailing on a boat that is so different than ours. It was a special treat to realize that we still prefer our own boat.

Kind of the way I feel about going to the boat show in general. I love looking at boats, love finding new ideas to implement or consider. But at the end of the day, what I get is an overwhelming sense of gratitude that we have the boat we have.

Sailing on Other People’s Boats is a great way to test things out, to see what works and what doesn’t. I highly recommend it.