Our Boat

SV SandStar 

Our floating home is a Lagoon 500. It is a 50ft catamaran made in France. We bought the boat back in 2015 and it spent the first few years being taken care of by our friends at Belize Sailing Vacations. This is the perfect boat for us…..not too big and not too small. It is small enough for Dan and I to handle by ourselves and big enough that we have some space to spread out. But compared to our land house this is still small house living…maybe not tiny house but you definitely need to think about what you have on the boat and what you bring on the boat. When we cleaned out our house in St. Pete it was eye opening to see how much stuff we had accumulated over the years. Some stuff was being used but most was hidden in a closet and we couldn’t tell you why we had it. 

How did we chose a catamaran? 

This is always a debate among cruisers. Some are die hard monohull sailors, some like trawlers and some catamarans. There are some beautiful boats in all of those categories. We liked the space for all 5 of us on the catamaran and I really like having our living space up above (this will make more sense in the pictures). In St. Pete we had a small power catamaran and we learned it was comforting to have two engines. If one fails you have the other one to get you where you need to go. The downside of this is the cost. Everything is double with maintenance. The catamaran also drafts a little less than the monohulls. In the Bahamas that has come in handy to get into some shallow areas. It will make less of a difference as we head south into deeper water. 

I will try to lay out some of the technical specifics of the boat below. If you would like more detail please feel free to send us a message or comment at the bottom. 

Make: Lagoon

Model: 500 

Year: 2009

Berths: 4 

Heads: 4 

Engines: Yanmar 75hp x 2

Electronics: Garmin but we still have our Raymarine auto pilot 

Feel the Power:

We are off the grid! It is pretty cool to make  your own power. Our preferred way is to make all that we need with our solar panels but sometimes we use the generator if we have a cloudy day. We have 1780 watts of solar. We were able to fit a lot of solar panels on our boat thanks to the work of Custom Pipe Design. Custom Pipe built us an awesome dinghy davit system that also holds our solar. We can also charge our batteries when we run the engines. Before we left we changed our battery bank from lead acid batteries to lithium batteries. We have 900 amps of batteries from Lithonics. The big benefits of the lithium is that we can use more of the capacity of the batteries and they also charge faster than our lead acid bank. 

Living Space: 

We have two main living spaces on the boat when we are at anchor. The outside “patio” area is the one that I find myself at for most of the day. The kids use the inside salon during school and playing games. 

Our comfy couch and school area

Yes, we have a TV but it is just for playing DVDS. 

We spend a lot of time out here! 

Kitchen: 

It is small but it gets the job done! I am still amazed at how well we can cook in such a small kitchen. Since it is such a small kitchen we do not have any of the gadgets or a plethora of pots and pans for cooking. We really have very little. Here is some of the specifics of our cooking life: 

Stove – Yes, gas with 4 burners. I love cooking with a gas stove. We had electric back in St. Pete so this is new for us. 

Oven – Yes, also gas and I feel quite the opposite about it from the stove. Not my favorite. It is either on or off. I just ignore temperature requirements from recipes since I have no control. We did add a big rectangular pizza stone on the shelf to help with heat distribution. I think this helps out tremendously when we bake. 

The Kitchen

The stove and oven

We have some extra countertop near the sliding glass door

Dishwasher – Yes, but see picture below. It will explain it all. 

The dishwasher...oops... I mean storage

Why is our dishwasher used for storage? Three big reasons: 

-       The amount of water required for a wash cycle

-       The amount of electricity required for a wash cycle 

-       We don’t have enough dishes to fill up the dishwasher so it would be a waste of energy and water. 

Here is a picture our dishwasher system we use now:

The SandStar Dishwashers 

Dishes – As I mentioned before we don’t have many. We have enough for maybe two meals or one big one. For drinkware everyone has their own Yeti lowball rambler. These are the best boat cups! They are not tall so they do not tip over, the come in great colors, and they keep your drink cold.  Just wash it every day and it is your cup for the day. Back in the states we would go through so many cups. I think we could fill the entire top of the dishwasher in one or two days. This is definitely a change and a welcome one.

Microwave – No, the boat came with one but we decided to use the cabinet as a storage cabinet instead. Again, it was a big energy drain and it didn’t really work all that well. Remember those tiny dorm size microwaves that heated food unevenly? That is what we had.

Fridges and Freezers – We have two small dorm size refrigerators and two small freezers that are just a little bit bigger.  A ½ gallon paper carton of milk will not fit in our fridge. We have learned that one refrigerator gets pretty cold and ends up freezing produce so we are careful to only put our veggies in the other one. We now buy all small jars and bottles for the refrigerator. No more Sam’s Club size bottles. They just take up too much room!

Ice Maker – Yes, we have one! This is a rare treat. Again a HUGE energy drain that is discussed daily since it creates a large deficit in our daily usage. Lots of cruiser use trays and they have some cool ones that make huge ice cubes that melt slower. 

Ice Maker UPDATE (5/18/18)-  A few weeks ago it stopped working. We think it needs to be recharged. But it turned out to be a very good system to break on the boat!! I know crazy! We usually are not happy with something breaking on the boat but this is different. It broke the day before we were expecting company. Oh no!! We could not find any ice cube trays in town so we looked around the boat and found some silicon cupcake molds that we had not used yet so we filled them up with water and voila! a few hours later we had ice cubes that remind us of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups! We were also lucky that my cousin was coming to visit later that week so he picked up two ice cube trays from Walmart and brought them to us. The trays freeze eight 2x2 ice cubes. Yes, 2 inches by 2 inches. They are huge! Ice cubes are easy to make and we have so much ice now that we are not going to fix the ice maker.  Why??? Well, remember it was a HUGE energy drain. Taking the ice maker out of our power equation has made our daily usage a million times better. We can make the energy we need with our solar (especially on a sunny day). 

Our cupcake mold ice cubes! Nice and colorful but makes us hungry for a Reese's Cup! 

This is one of our new ice cube trays! 2x2 ice cubes are awesome!! It is kind of hard to tell from the picture how big they actually are but trust me they are huge! 

We have so much ice now and a lot of power in our batteries! 

Washing Machine – Yes, we have one. This is also a rare treat.  Notice it only says washing machine. We have a European Miele washing machine that probably holds about ½ of the amount of clothes that a normal washing machine will hold. It is new and it works great. It does require a large amount of power so the generator has to be running to use it. It also takes a lot of water out of our water tank for a load of laundry. Now that we are paying closer attention to water and energy I can only imagine how much water we used back in the states when we did laundry. Drying is done outside on the lifelines around the boat. 

Bedrooms :

SandStar has four bedrooms. Everyone has their own room. The kids were able to pick their own sheets and decorations before we left the states. Our bedrooms are comfortable but compared to what you have on land they are very small. Everyone had to really think about what clothes and toys to bring onboard. Each room also has their own bathroom. Each bathroom is just a little bigger than an airplane bathroom. Our room and Emma’s room have a slightly bigger bathroom with the addition of a separate shower stall. 

Jack's Room - Spiderman meets Cars

Sam's Room - Captain America meets Guardians of the Galaxy with a little Yoda

Emma's Room - Llamas and Good Vibes

The Helm:

Most catamarans have the driving station off to the side of the cockpit but we have what is called a flybridge. It is an elevated area above the saloon. It has a big couch area so all of us can hang out when we are underway. 

The Flybridge