Boat Buying Blues

Friday September 12, 2014

9.12.14

The skies here in Ponta Delgada have been gray just about every day since we’ve arrived, and they seem to be matching the mood on the boat. And for once, it’s not my bad mood. Let me just quickly say that I’m not always in a bad mood, but more than two days without sunshine can quickly put me there. Now you can see why we had to get out of West Michigan. It’s basically like Seattle but with snow instead of rain. The sun disappears from November until March and it suddenly makes sense of why areas like England that are constantly cloaked in gloom have a little bit of a drinking problem.

But I digress and should get back to the story. The last I left you with our new boat buying woes, we had just gotten ourselves here from Horta, and in that short 38 hour sail Matt decided he could not live without the 48 ft aluminum boat we’d been going back and forth on for two weeks. Even though it has some issues and the purchase of it would leave us broke for quite some time, it’s not every day you come across your forever boat within your price range while you’re still in your early 30’s and we decided ‘To hell with it, let’s still buy that sucker!’. So an email was sent out to the broker last Saturday and we eagerly waited til Monday to hear back.

Eagerly waiting brought us the news that just that day, other potential buyers had been on the boat and seemed quite interested. If we still wanted it, we’d have to act fast. The broker let us know that another offer would probably be coming in but if we raised ours just a little bit we might still have a chance. Hmmm, the whole reason we stepped away from this boat last week is because we didn’t know if we’d be able to afford it with the necessary repairs it needs, and now we were being asked to throw more money on the table. After taxes, fees, registration, and blah blah blah, we weren’t even sure if we’d have enough money to cover all of it. Buuuut, it would be our forever boat. A fact that we just couldn’t leave alone.

Since we had no idea what ‘just a little bit’ entailed and the broker could in no way give us a figure, we countered with another 5k on top of our original offer and hoped that would be enough. We waited a few more days to hear back, the incoming information being that there were now multiple other people out there vying for this boat and our offer was not yet high enough. No agreements had been made though, and if we could go a little higher she might still be ours. It seems as if we were getting ourselves into a bidding war. One that we could not afford to participate in much longer.

I gave Matt the go-ahead to up our offer by only $2,000 more, really the highest we could go at that point, knowing that it probably wouldn’t be enough but having to give it a try just in case. We were indeed right that it did not match the offers of the other interested parties and soon came to find out that bids were reaching the original asking price. As much as it pained us to acknowledge it we had to accept that we are not getting our dream boat.

The thing that ails us the most, especially Matt, is that we had it. It was ours for the taking and had we not spent so much time in Horta contemplating and speculating on if this boat was for us, the papers would already be signed and a flag flapping the name MJ Sailing would be staked in the hull, warning off any other potential buyers that even tried to look longingly at our new boat with checkbook in hand. Both of us had already gotten so excited at the prospect of this new boat, already assuming that we’d be moving into her in mere months, that it’s hard to get over the shock that we’ll still be cruising around on the ‘Dip for awhile. We love this girl but let’s face it, she’s not 48 feet. And she has no pilot house, which Matt desperately wants.

Comments keep floating through the air murmuring things like ‘If we were on the new boat we’d have our own separate shower stall with constant hot water….If we were on the new boat I could store a million kitchen utensils and have a coffee maker on the counter…If we were on the new boat I just look out the window from my seat and see what’s going on….If we were on the new boat I could sleep while you watched tv and I wouldn’t even hear you’. All of these ‘if only’s’ that we’ll never have the chance to experience now, we’ll have to keep on checking ListedBuy to see if another option comes up. 

So yeah, the mood around here has been pretty bleak lately and I don’t think it has everything to do with the weather. Maybe we’ll just head up to McDonald’s again, the American equivalent of drinking, and drown our woes in a few Big Macs.

Source: czy warto inwestować w kryptowaluty

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