Buying in US as EU citizen

[Lieselotte]

Hey! First time poster here. If I somehow missed this question being answered in another post I apologize. But so far I can only find similar questions with some important differences compared to our situation.

We are a Dutch couple mid thirties, currently living in the Netherlands. We dream of buying a sailboat to live on for at least a year. The dream is to sail the Caribbean. It seems to make sense to buy the boat somewhere in Florida, since it's close to the Caribbean and there's a lot of boats there. We might want to sail the boat home at some point, but if that happens it will probably be a very long term plan. So we're not sure if we have to or should worry about dutch/European taxes being paid on the boat. We will pay the boat in cash, so a loan is not an issue. Im trying to figure out everything we have to think of in terms of taxes, insurance, registration etc. This is all new to us, so any advise from anyone that does have some real life experience is very welcome. Questions I have are:

- do we have to pay US taxes on the boat?
- does this differ between boats that advertise as taxes being paid versus not being paid?
- I think I read somewhere that we can't register the boat in the US, can we register it in the Nerherlands even if it's never going there? We only pay eu taxes when we actually go to Europe, right?
- what about insurance, any advise on where to get insurance? Can we get EU insurance? Even on a US boat? I read somewhere in this forum that boat rating may be a concern..?
- and finally, any advise on the logistics of buying a boat this far from home is very welcome :-)
- anything I missed I should be concerned about?