Buying the Boat

Well, we now officially own the boat.

The process was a little involved.  Once we had an accepted offer, we had her hauled out of the water and surveyed.  We did both a general survey and a mechanical survey.  There were only a few small things to fix.  We got the seller to pay the cost by reducing the purchase price.

The marina where she is docked at the moment does not have a slip for us, so we had to find another one.  We visited a number of marinas.  The one with the best price just happens to be 2 ½ hours from the ocean.  We aren’t crazy about that, so we ended up at a more expensive marina, but it is much, much closer to the ocean (Point Loma) .  It is affiliated with the other marina (Pier 32), so we can visit and stay there if we’d like.  That just might be our first trip.  What’s good about it is that the entire trip is within San Diego bay, so it is calm and safe.  A good start, I’d say.

Tom, our broker, is so very helpful, I don’t know how we’d manage without him.  He’s going to move the boat over to the new marina for us.  Thankfully, it is quite close to where she is now.

In order to put her in a marina, we needed proof of insurance, so at the same time, we’ve been looking into that end of things.  It turns out that, because we don’t have a lot of experience (less than a year), we will have navigation restrictions imposed on us.  We have a range of about 200 miles or so where we can sail, but, unfortunately, we are not allowed to sail alone until a Captain provides a statement of proficiency to the insurance company.   We have a Captain lined up.  According to Tom, we will probably need to go out with the Captain on 2 or 3 outings and then he’ll give us what we need.

We don’t want to be stuck within a 200 mile area so we discussed this with the insurance agent.  After we get some experience we will be able to extend the limits.  So I guess we’ll just hang around San Diego and the northern most part of Mexico for a few months.  Then we’ll contact the insurance company about taking her further.  Depending on how it goes, there is a possibility that we will need to take another experienced person on board with us for a while.  I figure we’ll be able to find someone who’d like to make the trip and will do it for free.

To avoid paying taxes, which could run another $7k or so, we arranged for an off-shore delivery.   Our broker, the Captain and maybe another official took her 3 miles off the coast.  They took photos of the GPS reading to prove that they were indeed off-shore.  They also took a picture of the front page of the day’s newspaper to verify the date.  This does mean, however, that we must remove the boat from the US within 6 months.  We cannot bring it back for 6 months or a year (we’re not sure exactly how long).  That’s ok with us since we aren’t planning on staying the US anyway.

So, we have the money, we have a slip at a marina and we have insurance.  And we have our boat. 

We still have to register the boat, so we do not have the rights to the name yet, but we’ve got our fingers crossed that there is no other “The Vortex” out there. 

If all continues well we’ll be heading down to San Diego in early January to start our new lives aboard.