There’s a Catalina 30 for sale in Hawaii that I’ve had my eye on for a while as it was selling for $5K and appeared to be in decent shape, and would not cost a fortune or too much time to sort out.
The Catalina 30 is by its very nature an excellent contender for being a VolksCruiser poster boy. For starters, at thirty feet they’re in a sweet spot size wise and so many have been built that it is fairly easy to find one for a reasonable price. Even better, with a beam of almost eleven feet, it’s a big thirty-footer.
If you do a quick search on Catalina 30s for sale you’ll see a wide range from nearly free to around $30K and like any boats for sale they run the gamut from overpriced to incredible deals. With that in mind, I’ll put the average price for a boat in good condition somewhere around $15K which works out to $500 dollars a foot or $1.47 per pound. The Cat30 in Hawaii selling for $5K works out to roughly $167 a foot or $0.49 per pound.
A quick side note on the cost of building a boat for comparison is that $5 dollars a pound is considered to be about as cheap as you can manage but with current inflation somewhat doubtful. So a reasonable facsimile of a Catalina 30 would cost you at least $51K just for the materials.
It gets more interesting when I saw that the owner of the Hawaii Catalina 30 just lowered the asking price to $2.5K. which works out to $84.00 a foot or $0.25 a pound.
Yowza.
That looks like a great deal. I love the fact the engine has been removed already, which would probably make the installation of an electric motor an easy enough job. But…. Hawaii?
Well, Hawaii is our hailing port as well as being a pretty awesome place and it’s not a bad place to sail to Alaska from. That said it’s just an example of the sort of deal you can find just about anywhere if you know what to look for.
Aha. I hadn’t realized Hawaii is your hailing port. I can practically hear the wheels turning in your head from here in Sarasota!