Saturday morning I was fortunate enough to be able to finally visit and inspect the Aleutian 51 Ketch I’ve been researching online…..
Integrity (Aleutian 51) is on sale now in San Diego and being represented by Yachtfinders and Windseakers Yacht Brokerage, the same brokers who we bought and sold Tulum IV through. As our broker was out actually out doing the very thing for fun that he sells professionally, (racing sailboats); we were introduced to the Aleutian 51 by none other than the owner of the entire brokerage firm, who also happened to represent the listing on the Aleutian. Having him escort us around the boat provided years of insight and knowledge at our fingertips and was pretty impressive since he knows most of the legends in the sailboat world, probably personally. Approaching the Aleutian 51, I was immediately struck by what I call low freeboard. IE, the boat was lower in the water along the main rail than I had seen on most other boats and certainly on a boat the size of a 51 foot ketch. There’s NOTHING wrong with this,,,,she’s slung low and sleek. With low freeboard, stepping on her from the dock was easy and it was apparent she had a nice protected cockpit and easy access to the decks. I’m not going to go into every detail of the visit as you can hit the link above to see pictures of her from the brokers listing, but I’ll detail a few things we noticed, as I go through the pics I took personally. Please look at my pix, look at the pix on the brokers listing site from the links above, and make your own decisions.
This Aleutian 51 is in nice shape and I managed to find one other blogger out there who used to own one, with glowing comments about their trip through the South Pacific on board their boat, which sold in Australia. I was disappointed that the boat doesn’t come with a dinghy or outboard engine; but it does have a nice generator, complete cockpit covers with hard dodger top and nice large anchors. In the end, the boat is from the middle 1970’s and her next forever owner will need to accept this fact to live with this boat. For her age, I think she’s in good shape and will continue to present a great value to her next owner.