Caveat Emptor
on a night passage.” There’s an en suite bow master, while the second head is shared by two amidships staterooms—one to port with a fullsize berth and the other to starboard with two bunks. A second stairway from there leads to the galley.
Shelcindra sports loose furniture in her saloon in the form of comfortable upholstered chairs and bar stools at the galley counter, but some available boats have a built-in L-shaped settee. The compact cockpit has a transom door to the swim platform, a docking station, and access to the side decks for easy line-handling.
Shelcindra’s owners enjoy extended cruises in comfort. “We bought her in 2000 and we took her to Florida in the fall and stayed there until PERFORMANCE A pair of Detroit Diesel 6-71 TIB diesels give an efficient cruise of 10 knots and will push the boat to 17 knots when more speed is desired. “The keel keeps her on course but doesn’t seem to affect her too much maneuvering around the dock,” Waterhouse says.
Cruising efficiency is at displacement speed, as described by John Pfarr, an owner of a 1986 Ocean Alexander 50 Pilothouse with 375-horsepower Detroit Diesels, who cruises his boat at 9-plus knots at 1400 rpm. “We ran from Lake Union, Washington, to Santa Barbara, California,” Pfarr says. “We made the entire trip in 5 days and 3 hours, 1,025 miles total. We made 1.25 miles per gallon and we ran the 8-kW Onan genset and the diesel heater the entire trip. So our miles per gallon are actually a little higher.”
For a couple with big cruising aspirations—and family and friends to share them—the Ocean Alexander 50 Pilothouse may be just right. At press time Shelcindra remained available in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, but we don’t know if interested parties have drawn a bead on her since. If you’re interested call Dick Waterhouse at Brewer Yacht Sales at 860-399-6213 or visit nice to be able to sit in that pilothouse and look out over your kingdom if you will, and be warm and dry and have some windshield wipers. The boat has a great layout and I sold one recently to a knowledgeable boater and he’s going to live aboard. The layout has the master forward. And he’s got a daughter that lives with him, so she’s got her own stateroom and her own head so it just worked out great—he just loved it.” Ray Prokorym, Ocean Alexander Yacht Sales; www.oceanalexander.com “The DNA of Ocean Alexander, the genesis started in those boats, and they were always a large-volume boat. If you go on an OA 90 or the 85, it’s a big boat. Good shoulder room, good headroom, good passageways, good staterooms. The ergonomics of the boats have always been large. I call them proper motoryachts. Compared with what’s out there, especially some of the U.S. boats or planing-hull boats, they’re smaller cabins, smaller companionways, smaller sitting areas. Ours have always been known for volume, and you see that even on the old ones. There was less allegiance to a particular engine manufacturer back in the day. You had Lehmans in these boats, or Detroits—another Mark II has Cummins in it, so there you go. In manufacturing and through materials and supply-chain management, OA eventually got more invested with a single manufacturer. But before that, you saw a lot of customer preferences winding up in the engine room. The company was in its incubation period in its early years and didn’t have the legacy or long-term commitment with any particular supplier. So you’ve got to remember it’s an Asian builder trying to build for the U.S. market. So if the U.S. customer is adamant that this Lehman or this Cummins or this Detroit or this Caterpillar was the engine and they had to have it, they were more semi-custom back then, all the way into the engine room.”