There are times when reading the yachting press (in those rare times when my scum sucking zinio app actually works) that I feel that we’re not looking at boats anymore but some crazed rendering of the “Blind men and an elephant” sort…
A while back when I was talking about the Columbia 26, a lot of folks wrote the blog asking why I liked it because it didn’t have one feature or another that some other blog or sailing magazine had told them that a proper cruising boat had to do or have any number of things that a simple 26-foot boat was simply never going to have or do… Because, you know, it’s a 26-foot boat.
The Columbia 26 MK2 for its size delivers, as far as I’m concerned, a pretty impressive list of stuff you need in a cruising boast for someone on a budget…
- It sails well
- It’s well built
- Has a well thought out ergonomic interior that works
- Has better than average stowage
- They’re available
- They’re cheap (as such things go)
From where I sit the only downsides of such a boat are that it’s a boat of a certain age and it’s more than likely that it will need some TLC factored into the program. That said, it is a small boat so there’s not going to be that much work or expense compared to something bigger.
In other words, it pretty much nails the whole need list for a boat of the VolksCruiser ilk…
An alarming number of people seemed to think that the Columbia 26 MK2 was somehow lacking and I got numerous emails comparing it to other boats that were either substantially bigger, more expensive, or completely different…