Mono's. Multi's. And Moolah.

So we decided about two weeks ago, after having returned home from a long and arduous RV trip that it was time to buy our sailboat. Not sure what set off the starting gun. We do seem to go from zero to warp speed in a matter of seconds but that's just how we operate. No sense fooling around, lets get on with it. Initially when we moved to Whidbey island we assumed we would have 3 years here, but seeing as after six months we decided this was the worst place on earth in which to habitat and Mark had an opportunity to get us moved back to Victoria, BC and further his career towards command of a naval ship we figured we,d take it. Ohh whoa, not everything was bumped up by 2 years. We need to start selling our stuff, it won't sell as fast here in sticksville. If we want an American boat we need to buy it six months before we leave, (a whole customs, NATO thing so we don't have to pay double taxes). So we frantically started searching the Internet for sailboats. Originally our ideal would be a nice catamaran, lots of space, lots of stability but also lots of money. Unfortunately being in America does have a draw back. Our credit is stellar, our equity great, but... (its always the buts) being a stranger in a strange land, we cannot get credit in our strange land. And our homeland won't give us enough of a loan to purchase our ideal boat because it would need to be an unsecured loan because the long arm of the lenders can't reach across the boarder. So... (The so's and the but's, get ya every time) this situation has limited us drastically to finding a boat that we can pretty much pay for in cash. Most catamarans we found of course were in Florida, now I am not so crazy as to think I could buy a boat and sail it 3/4 of the way back around the continent for my very first time on a sailboat over 12 feet. So we let the multihull dream drift away as it were, but buck up, on to monohulls. Well we searched and searched and searched and do you know what? There are a ton of sailboats in the pacific north west. True story. Unfortunately it is also true that any boat in our price range was either 40 years old, wooden or too small. We are having the darnedest time finding a three cabin monohull, it's like the rarest thing ever, because out of thousands of boats from California to Alaska, we haven't seen one (in our price range of course). So I figured the Internet pictures were doing them justice, for the prices people were asking I assumed they must be bigger/better than I am thinking. This idea lead me to view our first boat, a 40 foot double masted ketch in Sydney BC (not Sydney, Australia, which I did have to clarify when I called the guy up and heard an Aussie accent). It was old and needed work, was well below our price range as he was desperate to sell but I know I couldn't sail that thing singlehanded and there was only 1 cabin.

Disappointed but hey, it was boat #1. Next we ended up in anacortes, lots of nice boats there but not so nice brokers, people we managed to get a hold of we're kind of jerks so we got turned off right away, also everything was beyond our budget and the sellers would have had to come way down for us which we got the impression wouldn't happen. So we trudge on like good little soldiers and take the show on the road to Everett. Everett was interesting, nice people, lots of boats, one cat actually, in our price range too. Just got my hopes up when the broker talked me out of it. A 34 foot gemini would not be a good offshore vessel, it needed repairs and the bottom had some blistering so reason prevails and we check out some more, old 40 footers. Nice boats, CMS and Pearson sloops but all still too small.