Yeah, in fact reflecting on all the steps coming up to this, I realize the primary problem was the covid epidemic. Otherwise I'd have put eyes on the boat instead of a virtual walk through back months ago... No one would have ever even known I'd looked at this one...
But for sure - thanks for the offer and I'll be putting you on speed dial...
dj
When I heard of your adventure, I was surprised that there would be any doubt about concluding with a purchase and a trip up the coast. But under the circumstances, your commitment to making the correct decision, no matter the outcome, is admirable.
Sue and I did our boat search in April and May. We started by looking at models close to home to make sure we knew what model we wanted. That was an important step. Once we decided on a model, we expanded our search from North Carolina to Massachusetts. We had 15 boats in a narrow bandwidth of requirements and I ranked them based on the ads that I was looking at. We chose the range based on reasonable travel and a hotel stay for a weekend so that we could look at multiple boats on each trip.
That turned out to be futile when hotels were no longer allowed to accept guests. I eventually used three 12-hour days to look at 3 boats. Sue did one of those and that was enough for her. She wasn't with me when I found our boat, and it wasn't final until I made a 4th trip for the land survey. Then we finally were able to spend a weekend on Cape Cod for sea trial and to take possession and make her ours. That was 5 trips altogether, 4 of them for a single day. Finally,
@Ward H & I travelled to Cape Cod to bring her home at the end of June/July. That was a solid 3 months of commitment to the hunt.
We would have looked at more boats, but Rhode Island was closed, I didn't have the stamina to go to NC to look at one boat that was high on my list, and a broker actually told me that the boat in Maryland probably wasn't in the condition that we were hoping for. COVID made it difficult for sure, but the scuttlebutt I was hearing was that boats were moving. I looked recently and I think all but 1 of the 15 are no longer advertised (for various reasons other than sales, I suppose).