Category Archives: Boat Search

An Apologia for Boat Brokers And Some Pretty Good Sailing

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I am fighting the urge to wax philosophical about the lot in life that belongs to the beleaguered boat broker. Whereas in the past I might have misunderstood their pain and suffering at the hands of the average boat shopper, I am now in a position where I want to wrap them all up in my arms, pat them gently on their bowed backs, dry their little eyes and say, “I’m sorry for you! Would you like to talk about the possibility of finding an entirely different profession?”. I understand their pain. I feel their pain. We are living their pain because we are trying to sell our own boat. Why are boat brokers in pain? It’s because of people, that’s why. People who don’t know what they want.  And we know this because we have been those people and we have caused pain. And now we are getting our payback.

Watercolor of Moonrise

Watercolor of Moonrise by Alex Kimball

How could this possibly happen, you might be wondering. Isn’t it true that the price of a boat is listed, along with photographs of the boat and at least basic information about the make, model, and year? Doesn’t this guarantee that potential buyers will have some idea of what they are looking at?

If you answered yes, a big  SMACK DOWN for you because that would be logical, and people are anything but logical. Just stop right now with your logical thinking! You are actually more likely to have to show the boat to people who are really looking for a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT KIND OF BOAT. That’s right.

 

Here are some examples:

  • The person who has $40,000 to spend, but is hoping your $20,000 boat will be just as nice. Because, seriously, people always UNDERvalue their boats. 
  • The person who wants the style of a 1980’s boat at a 1970’s boat price. Again, photos.
  • The person who really wants an outboard engine but comes to look at a boat with an inboard engine. It’s pretty hard to change that.
  • The person who wants to spend $20,000 on a boat, but wants everything on it to be new. (Cue hysterical laughter here.)

A lot of rain in the mountains created tidal striations in the waters of Commencement Bay on a very sunny Labor Day weekend.

It’s becoming clear to us that brokers work much harder for the sale than anyone gives them credit for. It’s a lot of work to sell a boat. We’re sorry to any brokers whose time they feel we wasted. We like meeting people, and we really don’t mind doing boater education. We understand the need to look at a lot of boats since we, too, enjoy that, although we hesitate to waste a broker’s time anymore just to see a boat if we are fairly certain we won’t be making an offer. We’ve learned our lesson there. We don’t even mind showing our boat to people who are just curious because they know we have a blog. I mean, what boat owner doesn’t want to stand around and chew the fat about his boat? Ask us about our batteries! We’ll tell you…We might even take you for a sail.

But this is where our ‘boat broker’ experience ends. Brokers are looking to create relationships with people, knowing they will spend a lot of time up front and might be able to sell a boat later. Brokers have a lot of boats to sell. We, on the other hand, have only one boat to sell. Just one good, solid sailboat with a reliable engine and good sails that is ready to go with no required work on the part of the buyer that we know of.  What’s the problem with that? We wish we knew. We’re looking for one honest to goodness buyer who has done their homework about the kind of boat they want and who will offer a reasonable price for our boat and follow through with the sale. That’s all. Just one. Know anybody?

Cute little gaff rigged sailboat.

Meanwhile as we ponder the more philosophical side of this whole boat selling business, we ask ourselves if it’s worth all the hassle, all the emotional roller coaster riding we’ve had to do lately. We are getting a little bone weary of this whole thing and the idea of just taking this Cal 34 on the first part of our voyage begins to look more and more attractive. It would certainly be cheaper. It’s likely to be pretty uncomfortable sometimes, but, as they say, the ocean passages are only a small part of the whole experience. And it would just be so much easier.

In other news, Mike was commenting yesterday that this has been one of the best years for sailing that he can remember. We’ve had more sunny days, AND more wind than usual. We had two back to back excellent days of sailing on Commencement Bay and when I say ‘sailing’, I mean 6.8 knots on a close reach, all the way to Vashon Island. Woo Hoo!!  On days like that it’s hard to be upset that we still have our boat. It could be worse. We could own a boat that is so heavy it can’t sail out of its own way (in the words of a certain broker we know). Or we could have a project boat that just won’t quit. Oh, the thoughts we are thinking right now. They do go round in circles.

All kinds of interesting boats out on the water this weekend!

If you are looking for the companion blog post to the article on ThreeSheetsNW about the SSS Odyssey, here’s the link for that. We hope you read it because the Sea Scouts is a seriously cool organization.

 

 

 

Stoking the Fire

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This week I was talking to one of my friends where I work about our plans for sailing and how we still have a couple of years before we can really see the light at the end of the time tunnel. I was saying that it sometimes feels like I am adrift on a raft with no docklines, waiting for a current to catch me; like Kon Tiki without sharks. Probably I was complaining a little. Very likely. Like me, my friend thinks symbolically and she said that she felt like what I was feeling was a lack of “fire”, and that I needed to do more things to keep the fire under the plan stoked and burning. She asked if it were possible for me to do any new learning associated with this plan. Learning new things would keep the fire burning. I was happy to report that this was not only possible, it was in the works!

Mike and a classmate discuss a thorny navigation problem. To add or to subtract? That is the question…

For my recent birthday, Mike registered us both for a class in Dead Reckoning at the Wooden Boat Center in Seattle. I’ve wanted to learn how to chart a course and determine a compass heading by hand so that we wouldn’t have to rely on electronic navigation. We all know things break on a boat, especially electronics.  I wanted to learn how to use those cool parallel rulers and dividers so I could feel like a ‘real’ sailor.

This weekend was the class and it was great!  Not only did I remember why I never, ever took math in college, but I learned that there is a word called ‘uncorrecting’. I am not making this up. This word is used when you want to determine your location on the chart because you are lost. Maybe it’s because you are lost that you have to use the word ‘uncorrecting’, which implies somehow that you’ve already corrected something and are now undoing it. I don’t know. I also learned that sometimes you correct by adding, and sometimes you correct by subtracting, and this varies with the positions of the planets and how far the fog goes and what kind of mood the gods are in on that day. Sometimes you will add the variations to the east and sometimes you will add the variations to the west.  Good luck determining that little thing.

Wooden dinghies at the Center for Wooden Boats.

Thank goodness I got through 8th grade, because learning how to determine which compass heading you want from a chart in front of you will include challenges such as adding, possibly subtracting (again, this varies at the god’s whim), multiplying, and, if you want to know how long it will take you to get somewhere, also dividing. And you thought you were wasting your time struggling with all those word problems back in the day! It also requires drawing straight lines and reading very tiny numbers. These things will be easier to organize in your mind if you remember that Dead Men Vote Twice, and that True Virgins Make Dull Company. It was a challenging class on so many levels.

In spite of everything, because the teacher was full of knowledge, patience and good humor, I finally got the hang of it and worked out my own way of remembering the completely counter- intuitive use of words like ‘correcting’ and the new ‘uncorrecting’ as they relate to magnetic variations over time, even though anything you do, whether adding or subtracting, is actually correcting the heading. Bah. Of course, all of this is kind of chopped liver if you don’t know how deviant your boat is, because if it’s really deviant you could end up in China. And we all know that would not bode well.

Who says you have to sail to exotic locations to buy produce from a boat?

In the end, I found my way and look forward to practicing in the real world. Seriously, if you are in the Seattle area and want to take an introduction to navigation, this is a good class that is reasonably priced. Teacher Katey Noonan was easy-going and knowledgeable and I felt at ease with her right away. Plus, she provides Starbucks coffee and cinnamon rolls. I made it all the way through the class without eating one, but they sure looked good. Damn that vacation eating all to heck and back.

After all of that intense learning, our brains were tired so we had a little lunch out in the sunshine by Lake Union and then walked the docks down by all the yacht brokers, looking at boats. This is not such a great time to look because the pickings are slim. We did see a Wauquiez 42 that looked pretty good and gave me a serious case of winch envy. We got to go aboard a Taswell, a big Beneteau center cockpit, and a Moody 42, all out of our price range. I could not get too interested in the boats that looked like floating condos. They just don’t feel right to me, somehow. I know they are probably comfortable, but I found myself wondering how anyone would ever access anything behind their plastic panels. Overall, it was hard to get too excited over them and they all pretty much looked the same.

I asked Mike if he saw anything that rung his bell. He said no. He replied that he might flirt or hold hands with a boat just now, but he wasn’t interested in getting serious. I think we’ve both learned our lesson on that one. Until Moonrise goes to a new owner, we are the quintessential ‘lookers’ and unwilling to risk getting attached again. The Beneteau center cockpit had some leopard skin print seats he thought were snazzy. I took a pass on those. However, the tiny bathtub was an easy sell unless I considered how I would get behind all that plastic if the need arose. Mike reminded me coolly that to own a boat such as that one implied the paying of others to worry about such things. Ah. That must be the answer. First… get a million dollars….

I do have a special weakness for a bathtub on a boat, even a small one. It’s one of the things I know I will miss about land life. I love my bath. Hey, if Lynn Pardey can have one, why can’t I?

But a day around boats is better than almost any other kind of day, and this was a day that definitely stoked the fire! And a ‘shout out’ for the Signature Yachts brokerage on Lake Union. Their docks and boats are open allowing potential buyers to look at them at their leisure. I absolutely love this! If we didn’t already have a broker, they would win our hearts just for this fact alone. Broker Tori Parrott is friendly, not at all pushy, and it’s obvious she has a lot of experience with sailboats and sailing. She left us to our own devices with the offer to open any boat we were interested in looking at, no questions asked about our position in terms of buying. Many thanks, Tori!

Identifying Wildlife

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Today was a good kind of day. In fact, it was one of the best kinds of days a person can have on land, and a great antidote to my curmudgeonly mood of late in terms of  the subject of boats. Mike and I went down to Olympia to check on our girl Moonrise, have lunch, and generally spend the day hanging around together. We found Moonrise bobbing sweetly right in front of the broker’s office, next to my friend Sue’s “pirate ship”, also for sale. Hurray! Potential customers walking along the boardwalk have an unobstructed view of our boat. One of the brokers showed her today to a client who came down to see a different boat, saw ours, and wanted a viewing. So it does seem like she is getting more attention in the Olympia market.

Moonrise and her blue water friend.

Moonrise and her blue water friend.

What made today so much fun was that while we were in Olympia, I photographed two boats for writing reviews and that gives us legitimate access to the docks where we can walk slowly up and down looking at hundreds of different boats. It’s amazing how legit a person can look with a smart looking camera hanging around her neck, even if it’s just a little point and shoot digital camera with a fancy lens and complicated menus. (Right Lee Youngblood?) Today we saw plenty of very cool boats that made us want to see more.

This one is named 'Sea Lass'. It's pretty awesome.

This one is named ‘Sea Lass’. It’s pretty awesome. I’d love to review it.

I wish there were some kind of field guide to world sailboats because identifying sailboats is much like identifying wildlife. Most often there is no identifying builder’s or designer’s name anywhere on the vessel in plain sight, so one is left asking questions as though it were some wild animal naming test. What is this boat’s shape? What are its obvious habits? Is it a fast traveler or a slow and steady beast? Would this boat live best close to shore or would it revel in the deep blue sea? Is it built for colder climates and rougher conditions? Or is it a lazy kind of boat that enjoys soft warm breezes and gentle swells? Is its life expectancy long and full, or short and sweet? We ask these questions, looking for clues to the creator. After walking a couple of docks in Swantown Marina, we suspect there is a large contingent of Crealock owners down in Olympia.

What is this? Any ideas?

What is this? Any ideas?

Isn’t it strange how the feel of sailboats is so much different than that of other kinds of things we might travel inside? When we see an old boat, teak trim allowed to go grey in the weather, bronze fittings turning that distinguished shade of blue green, our thoughts go immediately to what journeys that boat has had. Where has it gone? Who has had the pleasure of the traveling? What has it seen? What adventures are resting in it’s hull, waiting to be uncovered? We don’t ask those same kinds of questions with old, beat up cars, though.

All I think of when I see a beat up older car is that it probably shouldn’t be on the road anymore’ that it’s likely a danger to self and others. Even with RV’s that may have traveled thousands of miles, the feeling is just one of ‘sheesh, wish this were newer’. There is never the level of respect for these vehicles that one can feel for a sailboat. Somehow, wisdom and experience doesn’t seem to be stored in them the same way.  I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps it’s that boats have been around for centuries. Cars are still pretty new in terms of our human experience. Maybe they just don’t speak to us on a cellular level like boats can.

Look closely for the guardian of the boat.

Look closely for the guardian of the boat.

So we wandered and wondered today about the boats we saw. We want to get started looking again for our next boat because it may take us awhile to find her. It will take a lot for a boat to live up to the expectations set by Flying Gull. The bar is set very high. We’ve come to terms with the fact that this summer will probably not be filled with sailing, but we’d like it to be filled with looking, like it was today. There are also some boats down in California that we’d like to go and see like this Cheoy Lee 50. It’s somewhat out of our price range at this time, but who knows what can happen?

Today we enjoyed photographing an Endurance 37 (the pirate ship in the first photo) and an Endeavor 42, both for sale through Capital City Yachts. I’ll be writing reviews of them to be published at a later date on ThreeSheetsNW.com. I’m always looking for interesting boats to write up, so if you are in the Puget Sound area and own an interesting boat you’d like me to write about, or if you are a yacht broker who lists interesting boats, drop me a line. My most recently published review is on a sweet little Perry designed Islander Freeport 36.

So, note to the Universe: more days like this, please.

Kind of says 'Yorktown' to me. What do you think?

Kind of says ‘Yorktown’ to me. What do you think?