Cheers!

It’s official.

The boat is ours. We took possession on Friday, August 7.

I feel like I should have done a better job at documenting everything, but it has been an exhausting last couple of weeks. I’m going to write a few posts to capture everything that happened/is happening now.  For this blog post – It is all about the boat!

Pre-boat purchase:
Let me just start by saying – the boat-buying-business S.U.C.K.S. B.I.G. T.I.M.E.

I could process-improve the heck out of it. Heck, my 9 year-old could process-improve it. It is frustrating. Makes no sense. And is super stressful for the buyer. We were told over and over that “this is just how it works.” Which is dumb because IT COULD WORK SO MUCH BETTER. Here, let me show you. When I ask, “what documents do you still need so that we can close?” You look at a LIST that you’ve made because you’ve done it a million times and it is WRITTEN DOWN SOMEWHERE. or not. Because that would be ridiculous. And you just wait until I’ve asked you 18 times and THEN you tell me two days before closing, “Oh, we still need a copy of the purchase agreement.” SERIOUSLY?

I could go on and on… but the kicker…  after hounding our loan broker for a solid week to make sure she had everything she needed to fund the loan, so that when we arrived in Florida and the boat arrived in Florida, we could inspect the boat, and the bank could fund it. She tells us, after we already booked flights to Florida, that if we sign the loan documents IN FLORIDA that we will owe an additional $450 fee. When I respond that we had no idea that we would incur a fee for signing the documents in Florida because she never told us… she threw it back on us for NOT TELLING HER that we were coming to Florida. OMG! Anyway… after we go back and forth on that, she tells us that she can overnight the documents to us while we were still in Texas (and have them notarized in Texas) and then we can overnight them back and avoid the fee.

She sends them to us. We sign everywhere there is a sticker to sign. We notarize everywhere there is a sticker to notarize, and we overnight them back. They arrive back at her office at 8 am on Wednesday. We fly out at 4 pm that same day. (If there was anything wrong with them, sometime between 8 am and 4pm would be a great time to tell us. But that is logical. And this is not.) The next morning (when we are in Florida, not in Texas), we get an email from our boat broker, who got the email from our loan broker (she didn’t email us directly), saying that the ONE document in the pile of papers we received that was the whole reason we had to sign in Texas – the ONE that was most important to avoid the fee – didn’t get notarized in Texas, and therefore we were going to have to pay the $450 fee since we will have to now sign it in Florida. Oh, and that the loan can’t fund until it is signed.

We were livid. LIVID. Matt had scanned all of the signed documents, so we immediately pull it up and lo and behold – on a page all by itself with no stickers and no signatures was a lonely piece of paper that needed a notarization (we signed the page before this page apparently, which is why we didn’t notice it on a page all by itself.) It was the ONE piece of paper that didn’t get a sticker. (coincidence?)

After blowing a gasket, we suck it up and head to our boat broker’s office to sign the stupid paper and get it notarized in Florida so we can buy a boat. After we sign it, we ask who we need to pay the fee to, and they were like, “I don’t know about a fee… ask your loan broker.” So we email our loan broker and tell her that they don’t know anything about collecting a fee… and she says, “Oh, well if they didn’t collect it then you don’t have to pay it.” OMG!!

This is exactly what the last three months have been like. THREE MONTHS of this. Never again. We love our boat and never, ever, ever, want to buy a boat again.

First Day on the Boat:

Our first day on “our” boat – we met the seller at the boat and he spent about two hours going through everything with Matt. Showing him where stuff was, showing him little idiosyncrasies, and walking him through things that would make our life easier for knowing. What a privilege to have all of that knowledge bestowed upon us.

We REALLY enjoyed getting to know the former owner. He is German. He is a surgeon and had taken sabbatical to sail from Europe to Brazil with his wife and two young kids (ages 2 and 4.) He is meticulous and the boat reflects it. He is also a great sailor.

We were excited to drink champagne and toast with him on us buying his boat!

The former owner is in the light blue shirt.

We spent the rest of the day Friday doing laundry – needed to wash all of the linens so that we could sleep on the boat the first night.

We spent Friday night on the boat in the marina sweating our butts off… So hot. We have fans and had all of the hatches open, but it was so hot. We didn’t sleep a lick. I wrote on Facebook – it felt like sleeping in a sauna with strange noises. Totally true. I got up like 20 times to see if someone was on the boat. If the boys were up. If the something was broken. If someone was on the boat. (That was my primary concern.)

But we made it through the first night, woke up Saturday morning and made coffee, and then made a list of stuff we needed to do, including figuring out how to get A/C on the boat.

We had one day to get the boat ready for our one-week, live-aboard sail school. Including provisioning for the week, getting some extra supplies, and trying to make sure we knew enough about the boat systems and how things work.

The next post will document our sail school experience… SPOILER ALERT – MOSQUITOES!