Oceana is a 1981 Gulfstar Sailmaster 39.  She was designed and built in Florida for a couple to comfortably cruise the Caribbean. There were only 57 Sailmaster 39s built from 1981 to 1984, and Oceana is hull number 40.

We purchased her in the fall of 2020 in Portland, and sailed (well, mostly motored) her up the coast to our home port in Pleasant Harbor Marina on the Hood Canal in Washington.

We have taken Oceana on several extended trips up to Desolation Sound, but this will be our longest continuous trip. Fortunately, she is spacious, comfortable, and easy to sail. Cruising on a sailboat is a different pace of travel. Our cruising speed averages about five to six knots, which is a little under six miles to up to seven miles per hour. Traveling 50 miles is a LONG day.

We love her interior cabin. The raised cabin has large windows which keeps it light and bright below. The interior is teak and mahogany and feels like a cozy cabin. The galley is mid-ship, and spacious. We sleep in the forward cabin—a v-berth—which means we need to practice some considerable “boat yoga” to get our older bodies in and out of bed for those middle-of-the-night needs.

We’ve done quite a few upgrades on the old girl since we got her. And the saying “a boat is a hole in the water where you dump money,” has rung true. But of all the upgrades, safety is always our first concern.

For this trip we’ll be mostly anchoring out (akin to being off the grid), so we’ve added solar panels to help keep our batteries up. August can be foggy off the coast, so we’ve added an AIS system to augment our radar. We’ve also added Starlink to have connectivity. We tell ourselves it’s to get the most accurate weather information, but being able to stream a movie now and again will be available to us, too.

To learn more, you can get the Gulfstar Sailmaster 39 full specifications here.