Tom Stokes was aboard his Pacific Seacraft 36, thinking about what the heck he and his wife were doing out there on the water. “We had one trip, I don’t even think we put the sails up,” Stokes says. “We were motoring at least half the time. It seemed crazy to think about a powerboat, but I started reading and got really intrigued.”

Stokes is in his mid-60s and wanted to make boating a little less strenuous during his retirement years, but without forgoing the parts of cruising that he most treasured. He researched powerboats that are capable of more than coastal cruising, and he realized he didn’t have to dim his dreams to ease his load. “People were going offshore, and that’s something I didn’t want to give up,” he says, now as the proud owner of the Nordhavn 46 Starlet.

Stokes is among countless people who have made the move from sail to power, or who have added powerboats to their fleets. Whether they’ve been messing about in boats since they were kids, participating in regattas at the local yacht club or racing in the America’s Cup, they all say owning a powerboat is helping them to achieve new kinds of boating experiences. “We’re thinking about heading down to the Exumas and Abacos this January,” Stokes says. “That should be fun. Then we’ll come back home and maybe make some longer trips. Maybe we’ll go over to Portugal or across the Atlantic.”

WORK YOUR SOURCES

Stokes says a key lesson he learned while buying his Nordhavn 46 is that other owners can be a great source of information. He read Buddy Bethea’s book Alaska on Our Minds about cruising aboard a Nordhavn 55, and joined a Nordhavn owners’ group, which is ultimately how he came to own Starlet.

“This guy who’s kind of like the organizer, I emailed him and said I was looking for a Nordhavn, did he have any suggestions,” Stokes says. “He said, ‘Yeah, there’s one that’s been around the world a couple of times. It’s in Australia now, but they’re coming back in a few months and they want to sell her.’”

That boat ended up being shipped to Florida. It was a 2000 model, and the owners had maintained it well. “They put 65,000 miles on the boat, but it wasn’t worn out,” Stokes says. “They replaced all the stuff as needed and kept her in good shape.”

The seller did an overnight trip with him, going through all the systems. Then, Stokes and his wife cruised around and practiced. He also attended numerous courses at the Annapolis Powerboat Show. He particularly liked the electrical-systems course taught by Nigel Calder. “I repeated that one,” Stokes says. “I did it again because it was so much information. Training definitely adds to the enjoyment and reduces the chance of making a mistake.”

He says there’s one benefit he didn’t anticipate about moving from sail to power. “The powerboat has more bulk and mass compared to a sailboat. There are a lot of yahoos out there on speedboats and stuff, and in the sailboat, we’d say, ‘Do you think they see us?’ But on this boat, they don’t seem to do that as much. We feel safe and confident, and it really is fun.”

KNOW THYSELF

A few years after George Sexton turned 70, balance became an issue. He’d never been averse to powerboats—growing up on lakes in Massachusetts, he’d always been around ski boats—but for most of his adult life, he’d sailed. He and his wife started with a Pearson 27 and then had a Pearson 39 for 25 years, using it to explore Long Island Sound.

“Getting out on the foredeck to handle sails started to get dangerous,” says Sexton, now 78. “And we wanted to be comfortable. A powerboat has more amenities. When you think about it, you can only sail 50 percent of the time if you’re lucky. You get bad weather or wind in the wrong direction, not enough wind, too much wind—it’s a lot of that.”

He was ready for a change, so Sexton connected with Mark Ellis, a designer whose best-known boats include models in the Legacy Yachts line. The Legacy 32, Sexton says, was ideal. “It had a generator, air conditioning and heat. It seemed to be the right size for my wife and me. It fit us. We would be able to get in places easier. It just made sense for us.”

They bought Starbound in 2007 and quickly learned to love the bow and stern thrusters. “You can park it wherever you want. You can go in and move it sideways if you want to.” They also liked the boat’s 21-knot speed, which now gets them from Martha’s Vineyard to New York City a lot faster than the sailboat ever did. Today, they often cruise with other boaters, as members of the Essex Yacht Club in Connecticut.

Sexton’s advice for people thinking about switching to power is to consider how they plan to use the boat. “Do you want to have people on the boat overnight? Is it going to be a day boat or a weekender? Do you want to go away for a couple of weeks on it?” he says. “I’ve seen some people go too small. Then they’re not using the boat the way they thought they would. You really want to research it out.”

YOU CAN’T GO WRONG

David Calverley—all 6 feet, 6 inches and more than 200 pounds of him—was such a powerful grinder that he not only ended up sailing professionally, but also competing in three America’s Cup campaigns. He was crew aboard America II in 1987, on Young America in 2000 and with Stars & Stripes in 2003.

“It’s a younger person’s sport if you’re going to race at that level,” says Calverley, who is now 57. “And I work, too. That led me to have less time to be on the water.”

Around 2007, he was juggling the responsibilities of his job and his family when he figured it was time to get a powerboat. He’d always been a sailor, but his own children never took to the sport. “If they don’t adapt and really love the sailing, well, you still want to get on the water together,” the Floridian says. “Plus, I live in Tampa. The bay has great cruising grounds no matter what kind of a boat you have.”

He ended up owning two Sabre powerboats: a 36 and, later, a 42. He loved the Downeast styling, as well as the ability to fire up the twin diesels and head for the Bahamas. It was all well and good until he was clicking around the internet one day and came across the Back Cove 39O. He liked the exterior and interior styling, and the outboard power, which would be advantageous for shallow-water cruising in the Sunshine State.

Hull No. 4 became the first brand-new powerboat he ever owned, after a visit to the Back Cove factory in Maine. “I threw a deposit down, thinking maybe I’ll back out, maybe I won’t, and then we flew up there and saw it, and I said, ‘No way, we’re not backing out,’” he recalls. “We took delivery in spring of 2021.”

American Girl, he says, is wonderful in a way that’s simply different from sailboats. “Powerboats have limitations all the time, based on seas and weather and conditions. Sailboats do too, but with a big-keel boat, you can go through almost any weather,” he says. “It took me some learning to understand the feel of the boat, how it handles in cornering seas or following seas or whatever you’re dealing with.”

Calverley says he has no regrets about being a powerboat owner—nor does he think anyone else should, either. “My gut would say you can’t go wrong, because you’re still on the water,” he says. “It’s better than sitting in traffic, you know?”

TO EACH HIS OWN BOAT

Being an attorney in the nation’s capital sucks up a lot of time. Now that he’s retired at 68, David Andril wants to linger out on the boat.

“Washington, D.C. is a terrific place to visit by water, but you’d never go there in a sailboat from Annapolis,” he says. “I never did because it’s a really long trip up the Potomac River. But in a powerboat, it’s a day. To cruise to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore became someplace we could go for dinner.”

Unlike many other boaters, Andril didn’t switch to powerboating because of age-related issues. Instead, after years of owning cruiser-racer and racer-cruiser sailboats, he got tired of trying to cruise when his boats were set up for racing, and vice versa. When he was in his 50s, he owned a J/80, and he added a Sabre 38 Salon Express to his fleet. That choice gave him two ways to enjoy the water—on occasion, at the same time.

“Sometimes I’d take the Sabre 38 to the site of the regatta and stay on it while racing the J/80,” he says. “What was different about the powerboat was that it had a generator. It had heat. It had air conditioning, and it went fast. It extended the cruising season, because you could go out when it was a little bit cooler or a little bit hotter. And the speed of the boat meant that even though we were cruising the same Chesapeake Bay, we could go to places we never got to in a sailboat.”

He chose the Sabre 38 after connecting with a broker from North Point Yacht Sales in Annapolis—and he learned that having a good broker can be an enormous help. “He did a really good job of asking questions about what we wanted to do with the boat and where we wanted to go,” Andril says. “This was a broker who wasn’t looking to sell us a boat from the lines that he represented. He was a buyer’s broker.”

Andril had to learn how to dock with twin screws and a bow thruster—a totally new exercise—but he got comfortable eventually. Moving into his brand-new Sabre 45 Voyager, which was delivered in 2022, ended up being a lot easier. “The 45 is much more sophisticated and much more complex, but it’s actually much easier to operate,” he says. “If I have to pull up alongside a dock, and there’s a space that’s 50 feet long and my boat is 48 feet overall, I move in sideways by pushing the joystick.”

It’s also incredible, he says, that the smaller Sabre displaced 20,000 pounds, while this larger one displaces 37,000 pounds, but they both have the same horsepower and fuel economy, and the new boat is slightly faster. “He says the Volvo Penta IPS system in the 45 makes a big difference over the conventional inline diesel propulsion on his previous powerboat. “The increase in efficiency is that you can move 75 percent more boat at the same or slightly better speeds with the same horsepower and fuel consumption.”

PERSONAL TOUCH

Georgian Bay in Toronto was a playground for Andrew Watkins during his youth. “I taught myself to sail when I was about 6 years old on a Laser,” he says. “I continued to do that for a long time.” When he got let go from his job at a real-estate company in 1994, he and his wife, Patti, decided it was time for an adventure.

“I was fortysomething, and a friend of mine said, ‘What are you going to do?’” he recalls. “I figured I’d get another job, and he said, ‘Why don’t you sell everything and sail around the world?’ And that’s what we did for six and a half years.”

Aboard their 41-foot Amel Sharki Wasabi, the couple cruised the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, out to Galapagos, the Marquesas, the South Pacific, New Zealand, Fiji, New Caledonia and Australia. Then they wandered through the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean and crossed the Atlantic to Trinidad—amassing about 35,000 miles. They then settled down near the Thousand Islands, where they bought a marina on the St. Lawrence River. There, Watkins developed a real appreciation for powerboats, as he was often moving them around at the marina. He eventually bought a Mainship 390, which he owned for a short spell. After he sold the marina around 2012, he went to the Annapolis Powerboat Show, where he met Trevor Brice from North
Pacific Yachts.

“I really liked the North Pacific 43 Pilothouse,” Watkins says. “Trevor showed me around for 20 minutes. A year and a half later, I went back to the Annapolis boat show, and I walked onto Trevor’s boat. He said, ‘Hi, Andrew, where’s Patti?’ I had met this man for 20 minutes, and he remembered me.” Watkins bought a used North
Pacific 43 from Brice, and then in 2015 ordered a brand-new North Pacific 45 Pilothouse. He took possession in 2016.

“We had owned a big marina with 150 boats, so moving a boat of this size was easy for me. Learning the systems was also a piece of cake,” he says. “When we took possession of the 45, we took off for three months to Alaska. That was our shakedown cruise, and it was out-of-this-world fabulous.”

The couple enjoyed the 43, Watkins says, but the new 45 gave them meaningful improvements. “The windshield in the pilothouse is a reverse rake, so you don’t get any glare off the water,” he says. “The finish is better. The boat is wider and bigger. The interior structure is incredibly good.” All told, Watkins says his appreciation for powerboats continues to grow, now that he owns one. 

February 2025