Welcome Barracuda!

After owning our aft cabin cruiser Rendezvous for three seasons, we decided the 9-knot cruise speed was an impediment to all-season cruising, given the short winter days and our daughter’s school schedule until she heads off to college in five years. So we began searching for a “get there” boat optimized for weekend cruising, but one that could also work for occasional multi-week trips.

After nearly a year of searching, we found a Gen 1 Riviera 42 Convertible listed in Seattle. She checked almost all the boxes: relatively fast 15-knot cruise, twin low-hour diesel engines, comfortable (if not odd) salon layout, two berths, two heads (both with showers!), and galley with full-size fridge. She was pretty clean throughout, and overall pretty spartan with no exterior wood, complicated interior cabinetry, or excessive electronics.

Here are some raw videos from the first showing and the survey.

Aesthetically, I’ve always liked the lines of sportfishers, but wasn’t a fan of their tournament style flybridge seating because it’s not conducive to hanging out with friends at anchor. Ultimately, I decided we’d probably move the “hang out” area to the huge cockpit, so the flybridge mattered a lot less.

After initially leaning toward naming her “Shark Biscuit” as a humorous nod to her Australian origins, we landed on the less-obscure-but-still-slightly Aussie name “Barracuda”. It’s actually a reference to our daughter’s habit of running around the house in a diaper playing air guitar to the famous Heart song when she was a toddler. And it seemed to fit the sportfisher styling.

I mocked up the graphics in Photoshop, and then had McNamara Signs print and install them. They even met us in Bell Harbor to do the install. I highly recommend working with them if you need graphics.

We took the boat to Bell Harbor to get the new graphics applied.

In the five months we’ve owned her, we did a 10-day trip to the San Juan and Gulf Islands, plus a couple local outings. Most of the time has been spent on planned boat projects, though. I’ll be writing those up soon.

Specifications