The Boat Purchase

I’ve been looking for a boat for years. The problem is timing. Here in Seattle, as in most large cities, live aboard slips are limited. Once I live on the boat, I’ll be able to save quite a bit of money. However, until then, I’d have to pay rent for my apartment, and a slip for the boat. At the same time, I knew that I’d need to work on the boat, which would be difficult if I was living on it.

At the time I purchased the boat, the waitlist for a live aboard slip was around 5 years. That gave me 5 years to work on the boat, get more practice sailing, and doing upgrades when I had the money. That’s also 5 years of paying both rent and a marina slip.

A few years before I was planning on buying a boat the perfect boat found me. There were always three requirements I had for my yacht. I wanted wheel steering, an aft cabin, and a roller furling. Polerys had the wheel steering and and aft cabin. Two out of three isn’t bad. The aft cabin has two twin sized beds, but with a little wood working, I can fit a queen sized bed in there. It does have this weird “feature” where the route from the aft cabin to the fore cabin is through the cockpit, instead of near the engine. That means that if I wake up in the middle of the night and need to use the head, I have to go up the stairs, through the cockpit, down the stairs, and to the head. Luckily, it has a full cover.

I know going in that this is a project boat. It needs a lot of work done, but it’s sturdy. Most of the issues are simply aesthetic. It has cracked paint, but no hull blisters or delamination.

The purchase was a little different than most people have experienced. The owner was stuck in France, and so the sale took place over email. She had a friend show the boat, and I was instantly sold. I made an offer, and after a short negotiation, the boat was mine.

Polerys was located about an hour drive south of Seattle, so I had to move the boat north. I’ll leave that for another post.

Now I have to price out boat yards.