Buying a Boat

Spontaneous is definitely a word I would use to describe the relationship of Jarvis and I to date.

• November 2008 – Meet at work
• May 2009 – Quit jobs and move to Spain
• June 2009 – Fly to Greece. Work and live together for 4 months as a Skipper & Hostess Flotilla team – especially random as I had never stepped foot on a yacht before.

One sunny day in September, when the Sailing season is drawing to a close…

“This has be amazing, wouldn’t it be great if we could do this all the time… y’know just buy a yacht and sail around the world”
“Would be brilliant… erm, shall we? “
“Absolutely…*sighs & laughter* … we could work for a year to earn the money and then just go, ahh that would be the life”

One year later…August 2010.

We have spent a year saving and researching, planning and dreaming, doing courses and getting skills up to scratch – trying to convince family and friends that yes we serious about this and no we are not crazy. The plan, as loosely formed as we had it knowing in brutal honesty, NOTHING, about long term sailing or anything was that we would need to look at the following:-

1)      Boat investigation:- Types, capabilities, size, cost

2)      Routes – when to go, where to go and how best to get there

3)      And the rest… how to victualise, how much money would we need, what to take with us, what we need to buy, where to keep the yacht, timings, crew needed and a multitude of other things that didn’t pop up in the wonderful bubble of “ let’s buy a yacht and sail around the world”

All with the aim of leaving in Feb 2011! (Yes almost completely wrong time of year – why not go in August, honest answer is we are impatient and want to go ASAP)

One thing we had thought about was WHEN we needed to have the yacht by. No sooner that Christmas 2010 if we are off in Feb was the plan, yet with a years’ worth of trying to bulk save causing us to revert to hermits, evening pleasures turned to looking for that yacht we could call home.

We had managed to narrow the type of yacht based on our price range down to:-

1)      Trident – Voyager or Warrior, 35

2)      Nickleson 35

At first it was just one of those simple pleasures that keeps you on track of your goal, and they were all over priced or so far away that it gave us a great excuse to not go see them… until Jarvis spotted a Trident Warrior nestling in Tollesbury marina…

40 minutes from my parents’ house in Essex, under budget and the boat had actually done the route we needed it for… well one little peek couldn’t hurt right?

It turned out to be perfect. Extremely undervalued, contained all of the nav gear we could want and MUCH more, plus the guy who owned her liked us and our plan and offered to ‘throw in’ the entire Caribbean charts he had, both paper AND electronic. Now that is a couple of grand’s worth of ‘throwing in’ there, and to be honest it all seemed too good to be true. We surely couldn’t be those people who buy the first thing they see. It’s a lesson we are all told when purchasing ANYTHING. There had to be something we were missing. It was time to shop around.

Trip to Exeter to view a Trident Voyager – £10K more expensive, all nav gear at least 5 years out of date, plus the corker for us being a covered up rip in the hull. No thank you!

Next trip was planned to go to Wales to see another Trident, but we received an email that day telling us the Tollesbury Yacht had had an offer, the owner hadn’t accepted but would a second offer be made?

Decision time – to buy or not to buy.

We decided to go for it. Spontaneity or recklessness at its best. We put a deposit down, went out for a trial sail and had her surveyed. The wait on the results for the survey was incredibly painful. Were we going to find out that we had made a big mistake!
To our great surprise and unashamed joy – she was in excellent condition and, I quote, “could be used to go on a blue water long-term cruise tomorrow”
Job done. Yacht purchased. Now as it stands we have 5 months until we leave and nothing else sorted, but that’s surely the hardest part done right?