UPDATE: Summer 2017
Well, we’ve done it. We went and sold Giro the Lagoon 380. Henceforth called “OG” for “Original Giro”, or “Old Giro”, or “Original Gangsta”, or “Old Girl”, or whatever you come up with. Regardless, OG will always have a special place in our hearts, memories, and stories. She was ours. She took care of us. She made sure we made it where we were going safely. She was our home. She will ALWAYS be missed.
Where do I even start? This “The Boat” page began as a place where we kept links to what we were looking for, lists of what we wanted in a boat, and it was basically our original “wish list”. Now that Giro is part of our family I feel that she deserves a special place of her own where she can strut her stuff.
As I understand the story, she was purchased new by a Frenchman as a “fishing” boat oddly enough. What the previous owner and I speculated was that he bought a boat that his family could enjoy, while still being a platform that he could fish from. She was not used much during that first chapter of her life. She often sat in fresh water on the Rhône river in France and only ventured out into salt water on a few fishing trips and family outings. In 2014 she was purchased by the previous owners, a German family who planned to sail her across the Atlantic and to the Caribbean while on sabbatical. At that point, she received a few upgrades and some TLC to make her fit for a family with two small children living aboard. This leads us to where our story with Giro begins. We first saw her for sale by a broker in the Caribbean. This particular broker over the years we had dismissed as many of the listings were of the “too good to be true” category. But she kept popping up in our searches. As we got closer and closer to our purchase window the attraction to her was undeniable and the fact that she was a German flagged boat in a Caribbean country was no longer enough of an argument to sway our decision. That combined with the fact that she had just been re-listed with a new broker helped. Long story short, (you can read all those stories here) she would become part of our family. So much so that leaving her in Florida less than a month after we purchased her brought tears to my eyes. Our awesome new friends on Cascalho offered to keep an eye on her and help keep her safe so I knew she was in good hands.
Giro is a Lagoon 380 built in late 2006 and launched in 2007 in France, hull #409. She is a four cabin model with two heads. She was never chartered. She is the S2 series meaning that she shares the same overall design with the current generation of L380 but her fit and finish is slightly different. Her interior woodwork is a warmer reddish color without the lighter color, laminate look and feel, of the most recent models. Not being a charter boat she wasn’t subjected to the increased wear and tear of those types of vessels and she happily shows it.
She is equipped with the more powerful Yanmar 3YM30 diesel. She also has the added benefit of over 400 watts of solar power feeding almost 700 ah of house battery power. Offshore she can go for as long as we want with dual 300l water tanks and a 40l per-hour water-maker. Not to mention a plethora of goodies to keep up connected to the rest of the world.