On Second Thought...

After sleeping on it and doing more research we decided there was too much wrong with the boat in Florida. We are willing and even looking forward to doing some work on a boat but some things are just not reasonable to expect us to do ourselves. Having a professional replace the vast majority of electronics on the boat would be very expensive and it's not something I feel we could do without perhaps making some costly mistakes.

So now, plan B. Plan B is actually a return to a previous plan A. There is a boat in Kemah, just outside of Houston, that we've looked at and even made an offer on a month or so ago. The owner rejected our offer so we moved on to the boat in Florida. Now we're back. The boat in Houston costs more but when you add all the repairs and replacements that would need to be done on the boat in Florida, the boat in Houston actually comes out as a better deal.

So tonight I signed the paperwork making an official offer on "My Liberty" and sent it to our broker. My Liberty is the name of the boat now but as previously mentioned, we'll be changing her name to Good Morning Vietnam. We've had a little back channel communication so we're pretty sure the owner is going to accept this offer. Assuming they do, we'll be scheduling another survey and sea trial. Getting to Kemah will be a lot easier and less expensive than getting to St Petersburg. Keeping the boat in Kemah will be less expensive as well.

If you'd like to look at My Liberty, click on this link or copy and paste it if it isn't a live link.
http://www.yachtworld.com/boats/2001/Hunter-460-2729013/Houston/TX/United-States#.VIe8TTHF9t1

I like the blue hull and have all along but I'm not much of a fan of the arrow. Whenever the hull needs to be repainted, the arrow will be history.

I'll digress for a minute, back to last weekend. While the trip didn't result in us buying the boat, we did actually learn quite a bit. The St Petersburg Boat Show was last weekend and we spent all four days, Thursday through Sunday there. All day, every day. We probably went on no more than four or five boats the entire time. All day long there were hour long seminars on all sorts of topics. We attended three seminars pretty much every day. We attended two seminars on weather, sailors need to know how to read weather maps and have some ability to predict whats going to happen with the weather. Lots more to learn here. The last seminar we went to was a guy showing the 25 things you need to take with you when you go cruising. From a yard or so of tulle (the fabric used to make wedding veils but very handy for mosquito / no-see-um netting) to using a feed bucket hung over the side of the boat to catch rain water. Lots of neat and inexpensive ideas. All this to say, there are lots of things going on at a boat show besides just looking at new boats.

I'll leave you with a couple of definitions that as we looked at what it was going to take to get the boat in Florida up to snuff we realized were dead on.

BOAT = Break Out Another Thousand
which then relates to...
Boat Unit = $1,000.

Brian