Aha – got your attention!
Well, to be fair, I guess the title should read “That Boat we Almost Bought”.
I thought today, I would regale you with the story of the boat that we almost bought about a year ago. The story goes like this …
We stopped by the Boat Broker’s office when we were on Vancouver Island, Thanksgiving before last. We just wanted to get the lay of the land, see what was available boat-wise on the market.
We were actually on the lookout for an old fishing boat that we could refurbish and live on. After a brief conversation with our boat expert, we learned that a fishing boat may not be the way to go. You see, fishing boats are designed to have holds full of fish, and a refurbished one wouldn’t be that stable without a lot of ballast in the hold. We didn’t want to put ballast in the hold, we wanted to put beds there. Hmmm, maybe lead beds would work. Anyway, I digress….
So, onto plan B, a motor yacht, and our broker friend just happens to have his eye on a beauty. The price is reasonable, and what do we think? Well, we look at it on-line, and we like it! It’s an older boat, to be sure, but it has everything we need and abundant cabin space. We return home, and ponder for awhile, then book another trip to the coast to have a look at her.
She’s also impressive in person, sitting larger than life in the water. Her owner takes us for a short cruise and we are in love. Having been reassured by the salesman not to worry about the fact that we still haven’t sold our house … there are ways of making these things work out. We pressed on and made an offer – which was accepted. Yay!
Now, since you know we don’t own a boat, you know that something must have gone wrong. Yes, you’re right. Two things really. First of all, our house still hadn’t sold, and it turns out that the salesman’s re-assurances were just that, reassurances – there wasn’t a grand scheme to help us own both a boat and a house at the same time. Imagine that. In hindsight, duh!
The second issue, and ultimately our saving grace was that the boat appraisal we had done returned some pretty dismal results. There was a de-lamination issue with the boat that could cost us upwards of $100,000 – yikes!
Well, we took that opportunity to bail (get it, bail), and got out of Dodge. We were a little sad – it was a great boat and the owners really made a positive impression on us. I suspect, if our house had sold, we would have made that particular deal work somehow.
But, now we’re on to bigger and better things!
Just a side note about the delay in buying ourselves a boat. When winter arrived, and we went to shovel for the first time, we couldn’t find our snow shovel. We had sold it in a garage sale last spring! Also, I still can’t find my winter boots. I think I may have thrown them away. I guess the lesson here is sometimes we optimists get burned 🙂 But now I get to buy a new pair if winter boots – so not really – yay!
