First time buyer - Looking for advice

[chowdan]

Hey everyone!

Well my girlfriend and I are ahead of schedule in terms of where we are in life + finances.

We are now on the market for a boat, that is sailable, but still needs "work". I hesitate to call it a "project boat", as I am not looking for one that is just a hull/shell.

We are willing to spend 6-8months of our time, working on the boat on the hard getting her ready for day/weekend sailing around the Puget Sound/west coast, however our ultimate goal is in 3 or so years be able to set off for a year long cruise through the Caribbean/West coast. The route we are planning to take is still up the air, however for us the first step is finding a boat that fits our needs.

We are searching for a mono 35-45ft, however since this is our first time buying, we were wanting to reach out to the community to get some advice from the pro's who have gone through the process.

Do you have any recommendations, questions you ask, things you look for, things to do, etc. when buying a used boat?

Also since we are not wanting to break the bank on the boat(reason for the fixer-upper), where do you do your searching? Do you go to marina's and take a look and ask around? Drive neighborhoods? Craigslist? ebay?

We have been limiting our searching to Craigslist Seattle, as we would suspect it being expensive to fly out, check the boat out, then pay a few grand or more just to get it to our location, we feel its not worth it. Do you have other advice?

We have 10k to spend, however both of us are in a financially stable position in terms of work, so we have contemplated about getting a mortgage on a boat, and if we were to do that, we'd want to spend less than 30k total for the boat. Would this be a better option?

All advice, articles, links, blogs, pretty much anything would GREATLY be appricaited!

On a side note, we are debating about spending the 6-8months of the up coming winter working on the boat, getting wood redone, redoing countertops/really anything needed to make her "nice", and then potentially move aboard her for a year or two before actually cutting ties. The goal of doing this would be to save roughly 600-1k/month from what we currently spend in rent, which over 2 years, would be a decent chunk of money saved up to help extend out year long cruise.

I came across this posting: Craigslist Post for 36ft Pearson - hoping to check her out this week/weekend to see the state of it, which is why i'm here asking questions/looking for feedback!