Sea Trial advice

[theonecalledtom]

Never too late for good advice. For us there will be a next time sometime in the hopefully quite distant future and others are going through the same experience right now.

We spent about 2 hours motoring and a little time sailing. In hindsight I should have rearranged the timing for the afternoon to catch the usual post midday San Diegan wind. As it was we didn't really see the boat sail properly. We did see enough to know that it will comfortably out point the ketch version I have a little previous experience with. Of course once we'd docked a lovely 15knt breeze opened up.

On the other-hand we did address some of my concerns with manauverability, performing a 360 (to the right only but at least she'll do it one way!!), a fairly brisk stop (pleasantly so actuallly though I have no intention on planning to use it).

One of the things that made us feel more comfortable was that we came away trusting the previous owners. They seemed honest about issues with the boat (as excalif says "we all understood it was a 20+ year old boat").

I'm sure that we could have forced a few more dollars off the price but I feel pretty good about what we'd already agreed on for the boat and in all honesty hope they feel pretty good about what they're getting for the boat.

Probably could have got more information out of the owners too but this is all part of the learning curve - we're still getting to our sailing feet and theres only so much either of us can take in in one go.

Fingers crossed now that all else falls in place and we can start sailing again - or perhaps our time going to be spent fixing the endless list of todos I can already see