My wife and I have been sailing for a year.
ASA 101, & 103 are handled. 104 is next week. We took our
classes out of Santa Barbara as the
price was unbeatable compared to many other
certification programs in CA. We've been chartering Catalinas (22-42ft) out of Southern
California marinas to get as much experience as possible. We've also crewed for a friend in
SF Bay with a
Hunter 33 numerous times.
This years worth of chartering and
crewing has really helped us identify our needs in a
boat. What is important to us became apparent as time aboard different vessels came and went. After reading lots and lots of blogs and CF and Sailnet threads and watching hours and hours of cruiser and/or
boat repair videos we had finally defined what we needed to accommodate ourselves and members of our
family that we might invite aboard.
The
shopping started with a rainy day cold soggy
boat show in Richmond
California (SF Bay) where a
Lagoon 38 & 400 were on display. My wife was not able to attend but I had to step aboard to evaluate space and amenity possibilities. We knew our
budget would preclude us from
buying new, but I / we needed to see a real cat and feel the space (or lack of) around us.
A 38 was clearly too small for our needs. A 40 was barely workable. We did more homework all spring and summer and realized our
budget was needing a bump. We bumped it twice actually, sad to see what 42-45ft cats go for as a buyer, but happy in a way as someday when I sell I may get much of it back.
Back to this
boat show in Richmond, I met the Bali dealer there from Cruising Yachts (Marina del Ray) and swapped numbers so I would have a
broker contact I could use when the time came to get a USED cat.
Eventually my
broker Jack followed up on a link I had sent him weeks prior when I was just looking.
2008 Leopard OWNERS VERSION 40 Sail Boat For Sale - www.yachtworld.com
He called quite enthusiastic to say it was low hours, like new, and very reasonably priced.
My wife and I did even more homework and looked like mad for anything else like it or better. We are sitting in Trinidad right now after a weekend of inspecting the boat,
survey, sea trial,
haul out. Happy to see it is just as beautiful as photos online suggest it to be (rare thing). Not sure how long the above yacht world link will
work. Might get removed now we are under
contract.
Wanting to share with someone who gets it, I needed to stop lurking here and actually say "Hi". Also to say we very much appreciate all the knowledge floating around both here and Sailnet. We'll keep reading as now we're in it for good.
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