We have a boat!!!

So it's final. We're buying New Passages, the Island Packet 38. Everything is done and we're just waiting for the documents. It's been quite an adventure getting this all together so quickly. The basics are that we made an offer, accepted with changes from our lawyer (which if you remember, the last broker wasn't willing to do), and went back and forth and agreed on a price. That all happened during only 1 day! I flew down 3 days later, looked at the boat, had it surveyed, had it hauled out, and did a sea trial. Happy with how every step of that went, we took it! I'm now delayed in Ft Lauterdale the day before Thanksgiving trying to get home.

It's been such a whirlwind tour this past week, that I'm just too exhausted to give much more detail other than it's a crazy combination of excitement and fear. The reality of everything has finally set in...we're within weeks of leaving our lives here for a while, and heading to live on a boat! It's what I've always wanted to do, but suddenly I'm scared...scared if it will be all that I hoped, scared that I'll be competent enough to do everything, scared of everything I have to learn about living aboard and having everything I need to clear customs between each island. There's clearly a lot to learn still. At least I feel like I have the sailing thing down!

Anyhow, tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I will just relax and enjoy the day. After that, it's pack up, get the boat documented, get insurance, and buy my one-way plane ticket down! Emily comes back on the 27th and she'll be doing the same. We're both done with work, and basically ready to go! So with that, I'm going to give into exhaustion right now. We have a few more paperwork tasks to complete this boat, so I'll give an update once I have a title in hand! Until then...

The boats

So, we've looked at a few boats quite seriously. We're quite close to getting somewhere now on an 1987 Island Packet 38. . . in fact, the offer is going in later today or tomorrow morning. However, to get to this point, here's a brief summary of what's happened.

First we found a brokerage in the BVIs called BVI Yacht Sales, with a very knowledgeable cruising boat broker named Todd Duff (editor's note: I kind of hate Todd right now. -eef). He helped me pick out quite a few boats that were in our price range and nicely set up for cruising already. I then went down to look at these boats for 2 days to document them with photos and videos. I immediately liked a 1983 center cockpit Tayana Vancouver 42 and after returning to go over the photos and ideas about the Tayana with Emily, we decided that she was the boat for us. Advice from my father led us to have a lawyer look over and subsequently tear apart the brokers standard agreement, to which the broker threw up his arms and basically said, "Nope!" Preferring just to not deal with us, yet having the boat we wanted, the broker and I went back and forth making compromises and increasing legal fees until we thought we had something. However, the broker's lawyer then told them not to stray from their default agreement and we were back to square one. To make a long story slightly not as long, we started looking elsewhere and came across the Island Packet at a Florida brokerage and that's where we are now.

It's been a long and frustrating journey, made mostly so by the addition of a lawyer to that process. I don't know if I'll ever understand if it was worth it or not, but it made the process not fun and, in this case, made us not get the original boat. On the flip side, it may have been a blessing in disguise. Though the Tayana was truly a beautiful boat, complete with teak decks, a large master stateroom, and every bell and whistle you could want, her insurance survey showed her to be slightly worn down, even for her age. Though we don't have a survey to compare with the Island Packet, she definitely looks to be in much better shape, including a nicely maintained, newly rebuilt engine.

So with that, we're going to put in an offer and hopefully come to some agreement on price. At that point, I'll fly down to the BVIs to check her out and make sure we want to move forward with this boat. Assuming we do, we'll do a survey and a sea trial while I'm down there, and then finish the sale! In the days to come, we'll see how this actually works out, but that's the plan at least. More to come when we make a new milestone. . .