Great Harbour 37

Great Harbour 37

- Steve Knauth

Steve Ehrler and Jan Murphy wanted to try the liveaboard lifestyle. They were looking for a good boat, about 10 years old, well equipped and well maintained, says Ehrler, 63, a former Navy submarine officer. “It also had to feel like home,” he says.

“I’ve always loved the water and lived on a river on the Eastern Shore for a while,” Ehrler says. “So we bought a [Nimble Nomad] mini-trawler that we could use to explore the rivers and Chesapeake Bay, and trailer to Florida for vacations. I loved being able to live on a boat for a while — go place to place while enjoying a sense of adventure and mornings on anchor. It was the people we met that lived boating, however, that first gave us a sense that we might want to do likewise.”

The boat they found, a Great Harbour 37, has let them realize the dream. It’s a distinctive displacement-hull trawler from Mirage Manufacturing in Gainesville, Florida. “It had the wide beam that made it feel like home, synthetic coring and good access to everything to minimize and make maintenance easier,” Ehrler says. “It’s well constructed and has the shallow draft to facilitate traversing the ICW and gunkholing. There is also a solid community of owners.”

At first, the couple thought about living at a marina, but the idea of full-time cruising was exciting, says Murphy, a retired clarinetist with the United States Marine Band. “This lifestyle is so completely different from the controlled and predictable life I’ve led. It’s an exhilarating adventure, as well as a challenge for me.”