A masthead fly is extremely helpful. We stuck one up there with a light. Compac or The Sailboat Shop should offer this as an option. We also put the optional masthead fly light on it which is wired to the navigation lights.
There is a bit of a mess at the stern of the boat that shows some lack of forethought on Compac's part. The outboard handle sticks right into a stern pulpit stancion. The stancion should not have been placed directly in front of the motor mount. There is no good way to store the bimini and farther forward the bimini track is somewhat in the way of the jib sheet leads. Compac needs to look at this and move the stancion placement and do a better job of designing and placing a bimini. Despite this, I'd rather have this stern than most others, particularly the open transom on some other boats that would flood the cockpit and head right down the companionway on the first trailing wave. The hull design is sound, but the things bolted to it near the stern could have been a lot better thought out.
The anchor is not something that should come with the boat, but a better bow roller suitable for a plow style anchor would have been nice, as would two strong deck cleats instead of one and a hawspipe big enough to put a length of chain down rather than just the nylon rode.
When we got a 27 pound plow anchor with 40 feet of chain (and 300 feet of 1/2 nylon rode) we added a hawsepipe large enough to fit the chain. We've added two cleats on the bow and line chocks for bow lines, and two cleats for spring lines. We haven't solved the bow roller problem which makes anchor storage on the mooring problematic. We may replace the entire bowsprit at some point. We later added another 40 feet of 5/16 chain to the 40 feet of 3/8 chain yielding 80 feet and about 70 pounds of chain in addition to the 27 pound anchor. This should hold in just about anything and with 7:1 scope we can do all chain in 8 feet of water assuming 3 feet of freeboard. We can also anchor in 60 feet with 7:1 or over 90 feet with 4:1 scope. That should be plenty.
The Compac interior is beautiful, with pleanty of interior teak it looks luxurious compared to the clorox bottle interiors of most craft of similar size. It is still a one room cabin with a curtain and a head in the middle of the V-berth area. The head placement is particularly poor. From a privacy standpoint, it is worse than camping out. Its amazing what privacy improvement you get in stepping up to a 26-28 footer. For a 23 footer, its probably among the best out there. An enclosed head off to either side would have been preferable to the head in the middle of the v-berth. Compac did manage to put one in the Compac 25.
We've added the fixed mount VHF, a voltmeter, two ammeters, and some switches to the port side main bulkhead. We went through two iterations of clock and barometer. The first, Weems and Plath nightwatch series, essentially fell apart. The second is the much more solidly built brass cutter series. We've also added some LED cabin lights and quite a lot of teak trim.
