Yachting and Boating World forums: Aft Cabin V's cockpit Flybridge

Well now, suppose your friendly sports cruiser owner wanted to move into a flybridge thingy

say something around 55' - 60' is not too concerned about brand but there seems to be a huge amount of product out there to start looking at with regards to cockpit flybridges but hardly anything that looks half sexy with an aft cabin. The only one I can find is the Pearl 60, now I have skippered one of these for an owner and to be honest I was mighty impressed with it, the rails and hand holds felt like they came off a battleship! very well built and goes like a bulldozer through the rough stuff, what really took me was the sheer volume inside yet you still had a good sized aft 'raised cockpit' and a flybridge although it s smaller than traditional flys but works none the less unless you have more than eight peeps up there. It seems a little dearer but at this price point not a huge issue but you seem to get so much more boat for your money and the fact that you are separated from your guests a night by the huge saloon and engine room makes for very peaceful life on board instead of listening to everyones ablutions and nocturnal antics.

Having said that I really like the look of the new Squaddie 55 just posted here recently and also the new Azimut 58 is a cracker, Sunseeker 60 could also be in the fray.

I guess I don't quite get the reasoning that there are so many cockpit flys around and virtually no aft cabin boats with any sort of oomph about them, seems all very trad looking and sort of ex pilot boat look about them. Surely that huge aft cabin has to be a bonus for very little extra dosh or have I lost the plot of what flybridges are all about?, it seems there is a big lump of living space missing where the cockpit is, I understand that you have steps to go up from the bathing platform on the P60 to the cockpit but not exactly hardship and on a 60 footer I doubt whether the height of the cockpit floor is that important or that different. Lazarette fair enough is an issue but is it really that critical against the trade off. There is obviously something adrift in my thinking as it seems there is only one builder of these aft things of any note but dozens of cockpit fly builders and guess they know what their customers want which doesn't appear to be anything with an aft cabin

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"It was absolutely involuntary. They sank my boat." - JFK

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