Interior photos
Aft cabin. The setee, viewed from the galley. The table pushes almost completely under the cubby, the seats fold down, and the area converts to a double berth.
Sitting at the setee looking forward towards the cockpit through the galley, which as you can see, is huge.
Starboard side galley “nav station,” which functions as a “miscellaneous-crap-piling-area” under more normal, non-photo-taking, circumstances.
Peek-a-boo alcohol-burning stove. I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. Fumes from burning alcohol, when not coming from your kahlua and tequila flambé cocktail, are a little nauseating even when the boat isn’t moving. Plus it does not burn as hot as other fuels and so boiling water takes about half a day. And I hear that finding alcohol fuel in foreign countries can be trying. On the other hand, we looked them up online and discovered that these stoves are really shockingly expensive; so, maybe it has special built in features we have not yet discovered—doubles as a short-wave radio or something. Plus, you hear all those horror stores about propane and how it will cause your boat to explode in a fiery ball the moment you install your stove. It’s a hard call.
Port side. Sink, storage, cute stainless wine goblets.
Cool wood details in the companionways.
Forward cabin, single bunk on the port side. The starboard side looks similar, only with more crap piled on the bunk.
Dressing room sink, port side, forward of the single bunks. The other side has a bench and some storage.
Oh god.
October 10th, 2005 at 6:33 pm
Hi There, I enjoy the blog and the pictures are great. I think you will find the alcohol stove will not cut it. It is VERY hard to find fuel outside Canada/US and the stove just is not hot enough to use for meals in an on going trip.
Nice clean boat.
Bob
October 10th, 2005 at 11:44 pm
James Baldwin (from Atom) says that he uses a kerosene stove but primes it with alcohol. This makes me think that the irritating smelly dirty smoky part of priming would be nice and clean (and only a little smelly)… We might go this route.
October 29th, 2005 at 6:08 am
What ever you do dont use any drinkable alcohol!
Rob :o))
August 5th, 2006 at 12:05 am
Having owned a searunner 31 for the last 21 years (Take Five, currently in Long Beach) I’ve found your site and boat photos interesting. Your boat seems to float higher than mine, I certainly don’t have that 4 inch or so water clearance under the aft end of the outer floats,even when the boat is empty. Can’t understand the difference either as I believe I’m about 4500 lbs empty too.
If I remember correctly… Searunners are actually 31.5 ft in length, not 31 even. Beam is 18.5, not 18. One difference between mine and yours is that I’ve got wooden (douglas fir) grates filling the space between the A frames and the forward/aft wooden cross beams. These grates lie flush with the deck on either side. This has worked out well and I’ve never seen it on other 31’s.
I added a hard dodger in New Zealand 10 years ago and have never regretted that. Also I have a stainless “roll bar” with a kinda reverse cloth dodger for the aft part of the cockpit, plus a removeable thin plywood panel top (with cloth side extensions) that lies over & joints the forward and aft dodger tops so as to create a roof to the cockpit when needed (usable even when sailing in strong wind). As you already are probably aware of, one bane of a center cockpit arrangement as the Searunners have is how the two smallish cabin areas get cut off from one other in rain or cold… I’ve found that an encloseable cockpit helps make the boat far more liveable.
I’ll agree with the comments about your alcohol stove … I’ve never had any issue with propane (I keep my two 11 lb tanks under the cockpit floorboards and can easily reach out from the galley and turn the knob on/off at the tank itself.
Nice looking boat Time Machine
Buenas Suerte con su viaje
August 7th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Hello,
One cool feture that i saw on a friends 31′ Searunner was the addition of a hole in th ecountertop next to the sink. When cleaning up food at sea, they just wiped the scraps into the hole directly into the ocean. It was sweet
August 17th, 2006 at 5:59 am
It doesn’t float so high anymore now that it’s full of crap. It also seems to dip lower in the front than in the back; not sure what that is about–mostly it just looks odd. I have to say also that I’m not surprised that the Searunner 31 is in fact just a bit longer. Everyone seems to actually be one to four feet longer than they ever say they are on paper…
Regarding the stove.. Fuel was very easy to obtain in Baja–all the local ferreterias had ‘alcohol industrial’ in one-liter glass bottles that were stamped with the word “picante.” It was methanol and burned cleanly with even less odor than the stuff we were buying in West Marine in the states. So until this point, we were pretty happy with the stove (yeah, it’s slow but I had forgotten how fast water could boil by then anyway). We stopped being able to find it around Manzanillo; instead, we were directed to pharmacies for the alcohol. Unfortunately, this stuff doesn’t release as much energy when burning and is not very hot. Sometimes it can’t even keep itself lit. Now in El Salvador, there is no methanol to be found, only ethanol in the pharmacies and people act like they don’t know what it is or if they do, that is a crazy thing to want to purchase it for anything. Evidently shellac is not used in El Salvador (methanol denatured alcohol is used as shellac thinner). One guy we talked to said he thought ethanol was in fact illegal to have in El Salvador (what the?). We have a gallon and a half left (a gallon lasts a bit under a month for us) and so we’ll use it up and then try to convert if we have to. We’re hoping that once we hit Costa Rica, methanol will be sold by the half gallon on all the street corners. Unfortunately, I can’t say that I’m terribly optimistic.
August 17th, 2006 at 6:01 am
We have a garbage hatch in the galley too; it’s behind the sink under a hatch. Unfortunately, it’s where I keep all the silverware/cutlery and random kitchen crap so it’s not a very handy place to be chucking food particles. When at sea, we chuck veggie scraps up out of the hatch over our heads and try to clear the boat. Sometimes we miss and find shriveled pepper cores or some such jammed into the tramp lashings.
April 19th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
Back in the early 70’s I built possibly the first 31 on the East Coast…Chelmsford, MA. Launched in 1973 we sailed coastwise and the waterway to Florida with our two children, 8 and 10. A fantastic trip! Many great mental pictures and memories. “Wandering Race” Unfortunately I sold her soon thereafter and we landed on Cape Cod running a summer coed sailing camp, Pleasant Bay Camp in South Orleans. Have been here, most of the time ever since. Until a few years ago I cruised a Brown 37, built in Ontario, down to St. Augustine off shore from Chatham here on the Cape. Enjoyed many warm and windy January days in the Bahamas, the Keys and the west coast of Florida. Our first galley had a two burner kerosene stove which issued black clouds of smoke if not primed correctly. At 35 cents a gallon it made sense. No refrigeration so we became “vegetarians.” On the 37 I installed a travel trailer propane stove, 3 burner with oven and had a small 12 volt refer. Now at 70 I’m looking for a used 31 to start all over again! Know of any 31’s for sale? Calm seas and the wind on your quarter…
June 22nd, 2012 at 4:45 am
I’m asking for a friend… Do you want to sell your boat? BEAUTIFUL JOB!
Mark