How we bought our cruising boat
We’d found several systems problems in our predeparture check of a 42’ Beneteau, and in the middle of fixing one our exasperated ASA Sailing school master looked me in the eye and said,
“I don’t know why you want to get into sailing.”
The meek shall inherit the earth...the brave get the oceans.
Yankee Spirit, Albuquerque, NM
Go now.
Sailors, cruisers, friends, experts,
students, writers and editors
You’ve got to have enough time and money; whether you’re rebuilding a wreck, outfitting a used boat, or buying a new one, you must have the time and money it takes to realize the dream. The trick, of course, is in knowing how much is enough. Our dream started a very long time in the past, although we actually decided to go cruising just two years ago. We moved aboard Pegasus, our 1994 Catalina 36, in September, 2005, at San Carlos, Sonora.
Part of our journey began with day sailing and bare-boating, Judy had owned a Rainbow 24 for a while, years ago, and we’d been sailing together, along with friends, several times. One of my great grandfathers was a quartermaster in Queen Victoria’s navy, and I have always had more than my share of affection for boats and boating. Judy loves the water.
The rest of our journey began with the collapse of the Colorado state budget, resulting in Judy’s involuntary retirement from her dream job, and our quest for another home. Durango is just too expensive and infested with development to live on a modest pension, and even in a good year it is all I can do to earn more than a few thousand, so it was off to cheaper climes.
We’d always liked Mexico, and our online explorations were showing us ex patriot Americans and English living comfortably in Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Belize, the Caribbean islands, and Iberia. We had visited several of those places ourselves, and we seen lots of sailboats in most of them but it didn’t dawn upon us why, that is, until last year; when we decided to see if we could live aboard a cruising sailboat. It is a very good way to go and see far away places. Our new friends call us long-term transients.
Timeline
May 2004
We begin talking to people about sailing, sailboats, and life aboard. We get together with the few sailors around town, asking for advice & opinion.
We start reading books: Chapman, Calder, the Practical Sailor guide to buying a boat, Slocum, Buckley, and Aebi. I reread my 12 year old stack of Practical Sailor and Ocean Navigator magazines, (I said I liked the sea) we even buy a few sailing books on the grounds that we couldn’t possibly remember all the sound advice they give.
We begin to get an idea what a livable sailboat is and decide to look at coastal cruisers, older ones. We were told that we’d have to look at a hundred boats before we fell in love and bought one. We actually went aboard 25 boats; if it wasn’t for the internet, I expect we would have had to go aboard a hundred boats before we knew we’d found one for us
We guestimate a budget:
Boat $75,000
Refit/Equip: $15,000
Travel & Acquisition: $12,000
Dumbish: $10,000
Ready for Sea total: $112,000
… leaving a cushion for medical care and necessity.
June 2004
Judy’s job evaporates and she retires, I continue to work as a part time college professor and veteran web programmer.
November 2004
We go to San Carlos, Mexico, to visit cruising friends, to meet broker Charlie (www.sancarlosyachts.com) and to look at some boats which cost less than 75 thousand dollars. We saw 3 in the yard, Lorelei, a 1970 Cheoy Lee Ketch, 42’ (with a woodstove), a 1989 “owned by a surveyor” Pearson, 37’, and Hamba Kahlea 1971 Morgan Out Island Ketch, 41’, the owner had obviously cared for that boat, it was lovely but, we thought, too much for us, being such newbies, to manage.
We did learn that those bigger, older boats were not always in the best of shape.
December 2004
We begin looking at boats on the web, talking to more people, and asking our friend the sailing magazine editor ( for his advice.
We found, from the start, that almost all the sailors we asked about sailing were generous, patient, helpful, and, except for one curmudgeon, happy. We learned that pretty much every sailor has an opinion of just about everything to do with sailing, and that some of their opinions coincide, fortunately for us.
We also learned that there are real sailors who do most things differently than the people we we’re talking to do.
Looking at boats.
The internet is a wonderful way to look for a boat, Yachtworld ( lists well over 20,000 broker sailboats, new and used, and there’s probably as many again FSBO ( search engines make it absurdly easy to find fleets of boats to suit anyone’s criteria. We had to know our purposes, our intended use for a boat, and translate them into search criteria. Translating is not too hard, and general purposes are pretty easy to refine.
We started with “cruising”, went to “coastal cruising”, then to “live-aboard coastal cruising“ to “long term coastal cruising“ and “live-aboard coastal cruising with two cats and a dog.” (Originally the dream said wait until the pets die off, then go. Everything we read said, “go now”.)
The biggest difficulty is in knowing whether a specific boat, or even a certain make and model, would meet our needs. Tough enough in person as it were, but impossible via the internet. We did use the internet to ask people who might know: people who were actually off cruising and living aboard. Judy found a marvelous book reporting the results of a survey of cruisers, which helped us construct a frame and sketch in our budget, skill and ambitions. We learned that we could afford a 34’ to 37’ boat and that our inexperience meant that a coastal cruiser would meet our needs, rather than a blue water boat, and we thought we could learn to handle a 34’ to 37’ boat alone together, safely.
The other biggest difficulty is in knowing how to buy a boat. The brokers were as thick as flies around us for a while, when we got to the docks, and followed us by mobile phone as we traveled about.
January 2005
As we browse boats on the web we begin to prepare for acquisition. We learned that we’d need a survey, which involved a haul, we knew we’d need to arrange for insurance, paperwork, and we learned that we would have to be doing the looking ourselves, that we shouldn’t buy a boat we hadn’t actually seen and sailed, which meant going where the boats were.
February, March & April 2005
We explore the world of online sailboat sales, looking at several hundred online listings. At first we base our boat candidates on generalities like extensive storage and heavier weight, not looking at boats we thought lacked storage and displaced less than 15,000 pounds. We begin to decide what kind of boat to look for and we develop our own list of boats we’d like to see ( We read more books, magazine articles, and web pages about boats and about buying boats. We start to refine our expectations about equipment; for example, we decide we’d like a roller furling foresail and self-tailing winches. We draft equipment checklists and start sorting out the online boats geographically.
We practice online with candidate boats, including a 1996 Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 37.2 lying at Tortola, asking price: $69,000, which we considered surveying just to see if it was worth buying. It wasn’t.
We outline a plan for finding a boat, buying it, getting ready for sea, and renting out our house. We make lists of resources we’ll need, we find a cheap sailing school and book classes.
May 2005
We count our money. $123,000. Enough.
We’d said that we’d start our life aboard wherever we found our boat, San Diego, Texas, or Florida, but really, life in Florida isn’t what it was when I went to high school there. In the 1960s the west coast of Florida was not crowded; then, Clearwater beach was deserted, littered with horseshoe crabs, and backed by vegetation. The west coast of Florida was settled by sea. The pirates, the explorers, the fishermen, the sportsmen, ships’ crews and the boaters helped develop the waters of west Florida. A paradise, for a while. Now it seems the pirates are back, and Florida is turning its back to the sea, toward the banks.
We heard the “marina sells to developers who plan to build waterfront condos” story a hundred times, and in the month and a half we were there last year, we saw it happen ourselves, three times. Live aboard slips in marinas are scarce and getting scarcer. As it turns its back on the sea Florida turns its back on the boaters, the very people who brought most money to the coast, who helped build the lifestyle for which the treasure coast is famous. Now the residents have turned on the boaters, making life aboard boats less convenient and much more expensive.
We’d been to Clear Lake, TX, and the NASA sailing district before, some 15 years ago, and we asked about living aboard there. We learned that it was a great place to live and to keep a boat (the brackish waters of Clear Lake were less hospitable to marine bottom growth than the G of M’s saltwater), but it was hard to find a slip in which to live aboard a boat. We didn’t make it to San Diego.
June 2005
We make offers on two boats.
The first was Leading Lady, a 1997 Catalina Mark II, owned by a doctor whose wife fell down and ended her sailing days, our first offer on this boat was declined without counter, our second offer drew a high counter, and we declined. We crawled all over this boat before offering to buy her, she was a bit mildewed and shabby, not cared for in a year, at least, and sitting in a strange position on a fuel dock at St Pete Yacht.
Asking: $89,900
Offered: $72,000, owner declined to counter
Offered: $75,000
Countered: $85,000
This deal was worked through two brokers (a common, co-broker arrangement) on the grounds that one broker, in Texas, had told us about the boat in St. Petersburg, where we had to see broker two there to go aboard.
The second boat was Pegasus, a 1994 Catalina 36 with a walk-through transom, she turned out to be pristine, if not a bespoke Mark II.
Asking: $86,500
Reduced to $85,000 upon first enquiry
Offered: $75,000
Countered: $80,000
Accepted at $80,000 after a day’s anxious deliberation
What we spent so far:
Boat $80,000
Haulout & Survey $750
Settlement & Documentation $500
Delivery $450
Insurance: Vessel $940
Refit/Equip $1,300
Decommission $754
Insurance: Cargo $500
Insurance: Mexican Liability $195
Transport: Palmetto to Tucson $5,750
Transport: Tucson to San Carlos
& Recommission $2,504
Bottom blisters $250
Bottom Paint $1,365
Dumbish (est) $420
Total: $95,678
With $3,000 or $4,000 yet to go on minor repairs, more equipment, a dinghy and a motor… leaving a cushion for medical care, more dumbish and other necessity.
Relationship
We had been warned, and read, that buying a boat can stress a couple’s relationship to the breaking point, and we knew that Captain Yell and first Mate Peevish sometimes came aboard couples’ sailing vessels. We had a couple of visits from Captain Yell ourselves, my grouchy disposition getting the upper hand several times as we looked at boats together, but we got over it. Judy and I have worked hard and well together on this adventure, we’ve been lucky, and we are in love. We found a decision-making process that works for us: we identify our goals and choices, we develop alternatives and options, and we wait until the best course becomes obvious. Sometimes we’d have to compromise with events as they unfolded but, more often, we succeeded.
Buying a boat took longer than we had hoped, and, naturally, we spent more money than we’d expected, but we feel very lucky and we are living on our sailboat now.