So how does one end up owning a boat? Remember last post when we mentioned how we like to wander marinas and look at boats and talk with Brokers, well one of the Brokers we spoke to remembered that I had said I would be interested in looking at a catamaran if he ever had one available.
One day Barb is checking the email and there is a note there from a Broker. He has a cat. Barb will freely admit that there were several thoughts that crossed her mind, including deleting the email before I had a chance to read it. She did not and I read the email. It was short on details including the location. Our area the, Pacific North West does not have a large number of cats so I assumed he had a line on one in the south. In which case I was not really interested.
Our daughter had an appointment in Vancouver the following Saturday. It would take a couple hours and was close to Granville Island, one of our favorite places to take in the sights and walk the docks. We dropped her off and headed over to Granville Island with plans to walk around, grab a bite to eat and basically kill off a couple hours. We were less than 100 feet down the dock when there, in front of us,is a Lagoon 380. A closer look shows the Broker standing on the deck.
Two hours goes by in a blur. We are looking at every thing, under everything, opening everything, talking about everything, asking about anything. We almost forget we have a daughter and are supposed to be picking her up NOW! Got to go! Will call later.
Later turned out to be the following Monday. The price was more than our budget. Way more than our budget. But it was already in Cooper Boating’s charter fleet and they only wanted to sell a half share.
This made it within our budget, however, if you listen to all the internet experts they would tell you to never by a charter boat and never have a partner.
So according to the experts we did it all wrong. We bought a half interest of a boat in a charter fleet with a partner we had never met. It worked out great. Our partner turned out to be a great guy who let us maintain the boat the way we wanted and paid half the bills on time and without question. Thanks Brian!
The charter gig worked out well too. I’ll do a separate post about our life as a charter boat owner’s soon.
We have had the boat now for 8 years. We bought our partner out 2 years ago and as of October of this year she is no longer available for charter. I have 6 months to get her ready to go but more on that later.
That’s the skinny on how we became boat owners.