To me the American Tug a 34 is a near-perfect modern-day embodiment of what Ernie Gann, author of The High and the Mighty, asked naval architect Jay Benford to design for him a half-century ago:

“I want a boat that will drink 6, eat 4 and sleep 2.”

This marks the fifth Bluewater and the second American Tug 34 Judy and I have owned. We had sold our Nordhavn 47 Bluewater in fall 2021 and told ourselves that as octogenarians we had no business owning another boat. But in the boatless months to come, we found ourselves drifting, really missing being boatowners.

How could we NOT have known that owning a boat was such a critical part of who we are?

Then we learned that this boat, owned by friends who'd cruised her in company with us in Nova Scotia, was on the market.  Click, click!  Not only that, but we knew the boat well and knew her owners to be fastidious boatkeepers. We'd even been treated to a dinner onboard with them. And we'd owned a near-identical boat in Florida for five years. Moreover, this boat was right in Southwest Harbor, ME, our summer homeport for the past 20 years.

 “Hmmmmm,” we kept saying to ourselves. “Hmmmmm.”

Then close friends moved in for the kill. “That boat has got your names written all over it," they told us. "Buy it, right now, before someone else does!”

That eye-opener was all it took to get us moving. We closed on the boat in June 2022 and spent a memorable summer moving aboard and learning how to live in the “small house” version of our 100,000-pound Nordhavn, trying to find room for our gear, and feeling very much at home back among our summer friends in Southwest Harbor. We also added lots of new equipment, sea-trialing the boat around Penobscot Bay, and we came away very pleased with what we'd done.

After owning and loving our Nordhavn for 16 years and putting more than 40,000 miles, including an Atlantic crossing, in her wake, the American Tug is a stark change. The good news is that she's smaller, simpler, more nimble, easier to maintain, and less expensive to own. The bad news is that the redundancy we so valued and appreciated in the Nordhavn is missing in action with the American Tug. But our mission statement for the tug is quite different. Our hopes are to use her for summer cruising in Maine and, from time to time in the Canadian Maritimes, and leave her in heated storage in Southwest Harbor over the winter. We think she's a great choice for that.

American Tugs are built in La Conner, WA, and were designed by Lynn Senour, who also designed Nordic Tugs.