Buying a boat, Selling a boat.......

This is a picture of my 4th sailboat.  I have purchased each boat with dreams of sailing off for an extended time, possibly never coming back to reality.

My first boat was a storm-damaged boat with a 4 foot gash in the side, an old 25' Hunter.  It was almost free, but there was a lot of work to get her ready for sailing.   I didn't even try to work on the gash, I hired a fiberglass guy for that - he made it bulletproof at that spot.  This was my boat to learn on and decide if I really wanted to go cruising.   It didn't take much to convince me and I was trying to convince my partner we needed to take a few months and sail to the Keys to see how great it was.   He told me it wasn't big enough to travel in.

OK, so I started looking at bigger boats.  I had convinced him that we needed to sell everything and visit the Caribbean in our own boat.  He went along with the plan, probably assuming I'd never get it all together.  The next boat I found was a 35' Morgan, an oldie, but solid.   It was in my price range and so I made a low offer and it was accepted. 

In the meantime, I had sold the Hunter - on time payments.  Great idea, I ended up repossessing it one cold winter evening - but that's another story.  It wasn't easy to resell, this time for cash, I made pretty good money on that little boat.

So, after a couple years of getting the Morgan ready for cruising and having multiple garage sales to get rid of everything, I was ready to leave.  I left my rental property in the hands of a supposedly good rental management company.  We sailed down to the Keys and landed in Marathon after visiting the Dry Tortugas and Key West (of course).  When I got my mail, I found that the management company was not doing what I needed, so we got jobs, I put the properties up for sale and we made more improvements to the boat.

Almost a year later, we crossed over to Bimini and moved down the islands to the Dominican Republic and beyond.  By the time we got to Grenada, I had not seen a bigger boat that I liked, but I sure found one there.  She was a CT47, cutter rigged and just beautiful.   And I bought it.  So,
now 2 boats - one has to go.  It took me a few months to sell the Morgan and even though I loved my new boat, I'm glad I didn't see it leave the harbor, I felt very sad about selling her, after all we'd been through.

About 7 years later, 3 years after my partner abandoned ship, I felt I needed to sell my CT47.  It was way to big for singlehanding, all the repairs and maintenance cost a fortune.  It was a tough decision and the day after the sale, I was at the airport walking out to the plane and trying very hard not to cry about leaving my boat and leaving the life I loved.

I landed in Daytona Beach, unfortunately an area populated by NASCAR and Harley fans and not sailboats and sailing people.  Sure, there were a few, but certainly not like I was used to.   After a couple years, I found myself looking at ads for sailboats - and bought a really sweet little 32' Morgan.  And I know when I sell her, I will again try not to cry at the closing.

I know it's not just the sale of a boat, but the realization of the end of the dreams I had when I purchased each boat.

Betty Karl
http://amzn.com/B009RCO02G

Bahamas

 

 

Everyone thinks of Bimini, Freeport or Nassau when you mention the Bahamas.  They’re too civilized and touristy for me.  When we cruised through the Bahamas, I loved the out islands, the southern islands that never get any tourists except by small boats.  Places like Acklin Islands, Mayaguana and Rum Cay, plus uninhabited places like Conception and the Plana Cays.

At one of the islands, instead of ice cream, they had frozen Koolaid in a cup, only $.25 each.  They also had a small souvenir shop called "Everglades Souvenir Store", with knick knacks for sale, all covered with small shells.  It didn’t look like they sold much, since they were pretty well covered in

dust. 

On Rum Cay, we were walking along the road exploring and an American man in a Jeep stopped to talk to us about living there.  He told there were about 6 couples/families living there, some of them have their own planes.  He got a phone a few years back and power was brought to the island in the past few years.  Before that, everyone had solar panels, and some are still in use on houses.  He said the locals were very accepting of them and very friendly.  Before deciding to build a house there, he had been cruising for 12 years in his sailboat.

On another island, some locals stopped to see if we needed a ride and asked us if we were on the yacht out in the harbor.  We were the only boat out in the harbor.  They see so very few people that they’re overly friendly and helpful.  We found a store on that island and bought some eggs.  The refrigerator at the store smelled funny when we got the eggs out, but I didn't think much of it.  Luckily, I looked at the eggs before I put them in our refrigerator - they had a couple maggots crawling on them.  We ditched the container and washed the eggs off.  Such is life in an island where the mail boat still only shows up once a week.

Mayaguana has an airfield which is no longer in use.  There were a couple airplanes off to the side, hadn’t been used in years.  There are a lot of stories about small planes and drug runners from a few decades ago.  We assume these were from that time, although we don’t know for sure. 

All these islands are sparsely populated and the locals are friendly.  Most of them didn’t have what we would consider a grocery store, but they had the basics.  Sometimes it’s nice to get off the beaten path to find out what a place is really like and what the people are really like.  And how simple life can be.

Betty

Island slide shows at http://www.youtube.com/user/IslandFeverCruising/videos?flow=grid&view=1 
Island Fever, the book at http://amzn.com/B009RCO02G