I was on another 36C years ago which was a later boat than mine, and had the ladder on the starboard side; I remember going up the ladder and thinking "this is a better place for it than what I have on my boat".
I don't fish very often, and I don't have a tackle center on Blue Note, so I don't need the space under the window to be that accessible. I do have a built in deck box there, but that could as easily have gone under a ladder if it was on that side; it wouldn't be any less usable. It's hard to explain; it may have to do with being right-handed, as foolish as that sounds.
I agree that having the ladder on the right might block the view out of the window a bit. But I very seldom drive the boat from the downstairs helm; virtually always from the bridge. And I don't dock it from down below, I always use the bridge helm for that. Now (again) if I was fishing, I'd want to use the lower helm, I'd want to be able to see through the window to the deck, and so on.
It's a small detail. Over twenty years of owning Blue Note, or something like that, I have gotten used to her idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, some of which I am sure I put there myself. But Hatteras built a lot of 36Cs between 1969 and 1977 and it's interesting to me to see how the design evolved over time. The two big differences that I wish I had are the larger tanks, and the fiberglass exhaust pipes. Although I don't typically run long distances, the extra tank space would be nice; I notice that on the 36Cs that Slane does over, they all get a larger midships crossways tank which holds more and trims better. And the fiberglass pipes make things a lot easier to maintain and less likely to leak.
The thing that I really should change on my boat is the wooden aft bulkhead, a weak point on these older boats, and something that sooner or later, I am going to have to address.
