Category: Preparation

Yesterday we started taking inventory of every single thing in our house, and each item was placed into a bucket: Boat/Bay, Storage, Sell, or Donate. There isn’t a lot of stuff going to the Boat/Bay, and about 25% of the stuff we have is going to Storage. This means a lot of cool stuff is going to be sold or donated in the next 6 weeks. It’s funny to me that we’ve been hauling 75% of our stuff around all this time if it’s this easy to let go of, but I guess that’s what Americans do…

Pay a lot of cash to collect stuff, pay to haul stuff around, pay to store stuff, and have stuff to look at. Buy as much stuff as you can, because it’s never enough stuff.

The reason for the inventory is that we have multiple paths going at the same time. We have to get what we’re keeping into a climate-controlled storage unit, we have to get the 2 plants we own down to David’s sister Wendy in Oregon, we have 2 cars to get back to the Bay Area, and we have stuff to go back to the Bay Area that we will either put on the boat or get rid of there if it doesn’t fit on the boat.

A couple of days ago, we discovered that U-Haul has something they call U-Boxes (it’s their branded version of PODS). PODS doesn’t come to Port Townsend, but there is a huge U-Haul facility here with one of the climate-controlled Raiders of the Lost Ark storage buildings for these U-Boxes. October 6 is when 3 boxes will be delivered to our front door, and 2 weeks later they will haul them away. You only pay for the boxes you use, and I expect we’ll only use 2 boxes anyway. It’s stress-free to be able to load our stuff directly into the box, have someone else move the box, and when we get to wherever we end up a few years from now, they will deliver the boxes to wherever that is (this includes international).

The “Red Bra Regatta”, a huge woman regatta, is going on in the Bay Area the weekend before we leave Port Townsend. I think I’m going to put the top down on the car, and drive down to the Bay Area for the regatta and leave the car down there. That clears up the two car issue, so if we need to rent a small truck to get the rest of the stuff down there, now we can.

As the days get closer, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how much I really do love Port Townsend and the Pacific Northwest. We’ve been here only 11 months; it’s so nice to live in a town where you can leave your front door or car unlocked, and nothing gets stolen. The beauty of this area is astounding. And I’ve come around to realizing something, hold onto your hats… I really don’t like the Bay Area anymore. I’ve lived off and on there since I was 15 years old, and I know the area really well. I have some incredible friends there, and there’s parts of the area I really like. But, it’s changed in the last 10 years. There’s garbage everywhere. The traffic is horrific. The homeless problem is huge (Slumdog Millionaire huge), and everywhere you look there are tent cities. It’s expensive, and lower-income people really struggle with living there. In the last few years, the Bay Area goes through many days during “fire season” where the smoke is so thick you can feel it searing your lungs.

I’ll never forget how creepy “Orange Wednesday” was.

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I remind myself regularly that we’re doing all of this for the end goal, the goal we both had individually before we met each other. The path to the goal is in sight, and we’re going to achieve it.

Two years to get the boat cruise ready and save more money into investments, and we’re leaving. We’ll come back up here. The next time we are “living” in Port Townsend will be in a transient slip on our boat.

In other news, this morning while I was walking Ernie, I met a couple who bought a house right around the corner from where we live here. He was wearing a Three Bridge Fiasco t-shirt and a Swiftsure Yachts vest. Initially I mentioned the vest (that’s the same brokerage we bought Prudence through), then I saw the Fiasco shirt. Turns out that they own a 44′ Alden that they used to have in Brickyard Cove Marina. Small world. Then again, that’s why people have started calling this place “Berkeley North”.

I wonder how long before we get a Berkeley Bowl and some whacko rent control in this town?

(The Kim Project just passed it’s 2 week mark yesterday, and has lost 8 pounds. The risk assessment team says it’s going to be a successful launch.)

As you can probably imagine, we’re going through a monumental shift in our lives, individually and together. Leaving the Bay Area was a huge shift in thinking, because we’d both lived there a long time and we have a tight group of friends there. Our sailing community is there. However, living and working in a wee condo full-time and watching David waiting for a pandemic to loosen restrictions on his job… well, I was watching him bored to tears every day. I couldn’t even get him interested in watching General Hospital reruns, because he just wasn’t interested.

After making the mental leap of “let’s get the cruising goal underway by moving aboard”, I started imagining myself living on a boat and overweight. It’s no secret than I’m overweight; I’ve been overweight most of my life, except for a few days here and there. At 53 years old, I’ve started to think that old classic “how does this weight serve me?” Realizing it’s not going to serve me living on an adult jungle gym, it’s not serving my mental health, it’s not serving my energy level, and it’s not serving my blood pressure (which was recently diagnosed as high, so I had to start taking low dose blood pressure meds), I have come to the conclusion that it’s time for me to grow up and make choices that will be good for me, keep me alive, and keep me off of medication. I really don’t like medication as a fix for things, and until this blood pressure med, I didn’t take anything.

I’m now in a committed relationship with The Kim Project.

I had wine flowing through my veins. I haven’t had a drink of anything for a week, and our diet has completely changed. As usual, my amazing husband (and chef and personal trainer) has upped his game and thrown all his support my way. Up until this morning, I was already feeling better, but man… today I have felt like doing the zoomies like a young puppy. Something in my internal wiring kicked in, and I’m flying high as a kite (and that’s without edibles). Happy to report in my first week of low to no carb with protein and vegetables, I’m down over 5 pounds. I won’t say how much more I want to lose, but let’s just say it’s a chunk. And this time, I’m going to get there, not because I want a “beach body” or I want to fit into these cute 501s… this time it’s health related. First time in my life it’s not been about vanity.

Here’s to my clothes falling off of me. Here’s to not having to take drugs. Here’s to throwing our lives to the wind and enjoying the journey. And here’s to Ernie still being alive. Cheers.

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I’ve had a few people recently ask me what the plan now that we own our cruising boat.

The loose plan as of now is to go back to the Bay Area in mid to late October, get the boat ready to move aboard (things like the fridge and freezer need to be fixed for example), and then move onto her. This is the subject to change part, because we don’t actually have a timeline on that yet, but let’s just go with that timeline for now.

We have some furniture we will be selling, and some of the better furniture we can’t replace that we will be keeping. That stuff will be left in storage in Eugene, Oregon, where David’s sister Wendy currently lives. We’ll take the wine, our clothes, and some of our kitchen stuff with us. The loose plan is to live in a friend’s extra house for now until the boat is ready, maybe 3 months, maybe 6. Or less.

I’ll keep working and saving as much as I can. David will work part-time with some of his clients who still want to see him weekly, work part-time for one of the boat shops, and work part-time on our boat. The loose plan is to do this for 2 years.

After that, we will head back up north to the Pacific Northwest, stopping first in Port Townsend for an undetermined amount of time. I really want to cruise up to Alaska and back, and we may winter over in the PNW. Then, the trip really begins… we’ll hop down the west coast stopping in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and then down into Mexico. Puerto Vallarta. Then further to the Panama Canal, and over to the Caribbean. Past there, we have two options we’re considering – back up to New England, or maybe follow the Robin and Mike route and go to the Caribbean. All the while, I’ll probably continue working a little bit, since I can and frankly we’re not independently wealthy. At least not yet we aren’t, but I keep working on it!

At least that’s the loose plan, subject to change.

I really do love living up here. This is the first time I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest after having lived all of the country, though my parents had lived here for a while before so I used to visit a lot. Too young to really appreciate it, and it’s a totally different place east of Seattle than it is here on the Olympic Peninsula.

This place is stunningly beautiful. It’s a sailor’s paradise, the water is a deep dark blue, and there are mountains everywhere you look. On a clear day, we can see Mt Rainier poking up beyond Marrowstone Island, majestic and just absolutely huge. To the west of us is the Olympic National Park, where the range has snow most of the year on it, including some glaciers at the highest peaks. And, across the Juan de Fuca Strait we can see Mount Baker in all it’s glory.

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Port Townsend, where we currently live, has an interesting history, having been settled by the first non-Indian settlers in 1851. With it’s proximity to the end of the Strait, and the entrance to the Puget Sound, the early settlers believed this would be a great place for the northwest terminus of the Trans-Continental Railroad. They built beautiful large Victorian-era buildings on Water Street “Downtown”, where the sailors would come in and frequent the brothels and the bars. The “moral” ended up building large Victorian houses up on the bluff above town in “Uptown”. The citizens of the town worked hard, building this town into a beautiful place, so the powers that be would choose Port Townsend, the “City of Dreams”, as the terminus. In 1873, the choice was made to go to Tacoma instead.

The town was abandoned by many people at that time, and it fell into the history books. It’s extremely rural, located on the northeastern tip of the Olympic Peninsula, in a place that is not easy to get to. Around 1960, the town started to grow again with the influx of hippies.

In 1981, Port Townsend was used as the location for the movie “An Officer and a Gentlemen”. Fort Worden, the nearby state park built in 1902, was used for most of the scenes in that movie.

As for us, we arrived to Port Townsend on October 1, 2020. I had been here in 2008 for the Wooden Boat Festival, but never thought of this place as a place to live. We were so lucky to rent one of these large Victorians in Uptown, an easy walk into Downtown, with a view of the water. There are many things we love about living up here, which is the reason we will bring our boat back up here to cruise first. I LOVE that it’s a small town, and it’s quiet. You can hear birds sing all the time, and there is not the underlying din of traffic noise that you hear everywhere you go in the Bay Area (you may not believe me, but we notice it now when we go back, even from the “isolation” of Brickyard Cove). I can walk out of the house without locking the door, and I know that when I return nobody will be in there and my stuff will still be inside. On that note, I can leave my purse in the car and go into the store, leave the car unlocked, and when I get back it will still be there. (I don’t do that often, that was a mistake the one time I did it.) I’m more in touch with nature here, whether I want to be or not.

So, why would we want to leave here?

There’s a few things I don’t like about living in Port Townsend. This town is 10,000 people, and growing constantly. Most of the people that are coming here are from California (us included). The difference between us and them is that most of those people have wads of cash to spend on real estate, and it’s driven the cost of housing here just absolutely off-the-charts crazy. This doesn’t affect us, but we do live in a town that is fully gentrified and inaccessible to the people who grew up here or work in the service industry. Those that don’t have wads of cash, or come with their own business, or who aren’t independently wealthy, have a hard time finding affordable housing. Some end up homeless. This is not a hospitable place to live for many people. Frankly, I don’t know why people keep coming here if there isn’t a place to live, but they do… I don’t want to live somewhere where the line between the “haves and have nots” is so extreme.

We live 2-2.5 hours from SEATAC in a town that doesn’t allow Uber/Lyft or good regular transportation to the airport. Given the rate that we like to travel, that’s a long way to drive. By the time I get to the airport from here, I’ve already spent more time driving than the flight takes to get back to the Bay Area!

Almost everyone in this town is a white person and they are older than we are. When we arrived, I heard a few times “it’s nice to see young people moving to town.” I’m 53 and David is 57… we’re not young. After having lived in the Bay Area for most of my adult life, peppered with some Austin Texas and Boston MA in there, I like having different cultures around. I like having options for good ethnic food to choose from. I like living amongst people who know the difference between Laotian and Thai and Cambodian food, and who can tell when someone is Japanese or Chinese or Korean. It’s actually uncomfortable to me to notice when I see one African-American person a month. I get a lot out of interacting with different cultures, and learning from other people that didn’t grow up the way I did.

Washington is a very white state, and we chose to live in the whitest town in the state. Having said that, if we could afford it, I could see us settling up here someday. Maybe.

The name is Prudence. It’s always been Prudence. Pru402 is now Prudence, Mid Pru was Prudence, and Old Pru was Prudence. The name arrived when David arrived, and he says that as long as he’s wanted a big boat to live on, he’s wanted to name it Prudence. Why?

“It’s a play on words,” David says. “What’s less prudent than owning a boat?” The answer is always “owning a horse.”

Some people consider renaming a boat a travesty, an affront to the sea Gods, and goading Neptune to sink your vessel. After a lot of research though, it’s done often, and as long as you do it right and with plenty of expensive champagne, the ocean should take care of you.

Old Pru had been named Mabuhay by the previous owners when they bought her new at the Cow Palace boat show in 1977. They cruised Mabuhay up and down the west coast, and took her to Hawaii. When David acquired her, he had not gone through the proper channels to rename a boat, and that boat had all kinds of issues. She almost tried to sink herself, even. He thought I was crazy when I said “well, you didn’t rename her properly, of course you are going to have problems.” Neither of us are superstitious people, but why flaunt your arrogance when you don’t actually know for sure? David and I removed all traces of the previous name and the name “Prudence”, went backwards, and alone we did a renaming ceremony.

When we acquired Mid Pru, she was named “Austral”. She was on the hard at KKMI when we did her renaming ceremony, but first we denamed her. Then, on a dreary January day we invited our friends to come over and rename her from the pavement, we had some decent champagne, and some munchies. It was a fun, simple afternoon party.

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Pru402 came with the name “Blow’n Away” in HUGE letters on both sides. The ‘A’ alone was 16 inches high. Someone wanted to make it very clear to everyone in the bay that they were “blown away”. The man who originally owned and named her was someone Allison (our broker) knew, because she was the one that commissioned the boat for him. The 2nd owner never changed the name, and it appears he barely sailed the boat. We decided to rename this one too, because why change the name if it’s been working so far? It’s like a good luck charm.

July 24, 2021, we had a renaming party at Richmond Yacht Club with 20 of our friends. This time, we bought good champagne for Neptune and a couple bottles of excellent rum. We had Cornelio at the taco truck behind the Chevron make us a platter 120 street tacos for the event. And, we had an excellent time making the boat ours. The party lasted well into the evening with most of the same people that were at the last renaming party.

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How to Rename a Boat 

1. Remove all traces of the current name.
2. Begin the purging ceremony.
3. Begin the renaming ceremony.
4. Appease the four wind gods.
5. If you have champagne left, indulge in honor of completing the ceremony.

1. Remove all traces of the current name.

Start by taking any and every item bearing the boat’s name off the boat. This means documents, decor items, nameboards, and even life rings. Then, strike the name from every record, ranging from log books to maintenance documents. Some people recommend burning them, to ensure you obliterate the name, but white-out fluid does the trick just as well. Finally, after you’ve checked and re-checked that you’ve completed these steps, write the old name in water-soluble ink on a metal tag. Do not, under any circumstances, take even one item with the new name onboard yet! In fact, you can’t do this until you’ve completed all of the tasks outlined below.

2. Begin the purging ceremony.

The official ceremony, in which you address Poseidon himself, calls for good champagne, and good friends as witnesses. Once you’re gathered together on the bow of the boat, recite the following:

Oh mighty and great ruler of the seas and oceans, to whom all ships and we who venture upon your vast domain are required to pay homage, I implore you in your graciousness to expunge for all time from your records and recollection the name (mention the old boat name), which has ceased to be an entity in your kingdom. As proof thereof, we submit this ingot bearing her name, to be corrupted through your powers and forever be purged from the sea.

At this point, drop the metal tag over the bow into the water. Then say:

In grateful acknowledgement of your munificence and dispensation, we offer these libations to your majesty and your court.

Pour at least half the champagne into the water, from east to west. Share the rest among yourselves.

3. Begin the renaming ceremony. 

Speak to Poseidon once again:

Oh mighty and great ruler of the seas and oceans, to whom all ships and we who venture upon your vast domain are required to pay homage, I implore you in your graciousness to take unto your records and recollection this worthy vessel hereafter and for all time known as (say the name you’ve selected), guarding her with your mighty arm and trident and ensuring her of safe and rapid passage throughout her journeys within your realm.

In appreciation of your munificence, dispensation, and in honor of your greatness, we offer these libations to your majesty and your court.

Make sure you have more champagne on hand, because you’ll need to pour it, minus one glass for you and one for the mate, into the water, this time from west to east.

4. Appease the four wind gods.

Renaming a boat also involves asking for fair winds and calm seas for your pending voyages. Recite:

Oh mighty rulers of the winds, through whose power our frail vessels traverse the wild and faceless deep, we implore you to grant this worthy vessel (say your boat’s new name) the benefits and pleasures of your bounty, ensuring us of your gentle ministration according to our needs.

Next, address each wind god individually. In facing north, pour champagne into a champagne flute and toss the libation to the north as you say:

Great Boreas, exalted ruler of the North Wind, grant us permission to use your mighty powers in the pursuit of our lawful endeavors, ever sparing us the overwhelming scourge of your frigid breath.

Next face west, repeating the champagne pour and toss while saying:

Great Zephyrus, exalted ruler of the West Wind, grant us permission to use your mighty powers in the pursuit of our lawful endeavors, ever sparing us the overwhelming scourge of your wild breath.

Face east, repeating the champagne pour and toss while saying:

Great Eurus, exalted ruler of the East Wind, grant us permission to use your mighty powers in the pursuit of our lawful endeavors, ever sparing us the overwhelming scourge of your mighty breath.

Lastly, face south, pouring the champagne and tossing it while reciting:

Great Notus, exalted ruler of the South Wind, grant us permission to use your mighty powers in the pursuit of our lawful endeavors, ever sparing us the overwhelming scourge of your scalding breath.

5. Finish Off the Champagne

If you have any champagne left, indulge in honor of completing the ceremony.

Now, at long last, you can take your first item bearing the new name onto your boat. Hopefully you haven’t had the transom graphics changed yet. If scheduling issues prevented waiting until after the renaming ceremony, though, keep the new name covered until you finish all the steps.

Yes, this is incredibly detailed, and incredibly superstitious. But would you rather tempt fate?

The boat we just bought has a top priority list of things that need to be done on her, and managing these projects from far away isn’t easy. It’s made much easier though working with people who have become our friends from the last many many years of living in the Bay Area.

We have 2 large projects going right now…

You may have noticed our boat does not have a dodger on it. We get to have a dodger built for her exactly the way we want the dodger built. When we were last in the Bay Area, we stood at the oversized wheel, and measured for height and viewing pleasure… which is great, because many dodgers either cut through your line of sight, or one of us can look successfully under it, but the other can’t. This dodger is perfect for both of us. That should be installed in early October, and will make the boat infinitely more pleasurable to sail.

The second large project is the furling boom system. These furling booms are to make sailing easier, and along with the furling boom usually comes an electric winch. The system we have on this boat is a Shaeffer, and it’s fine and works. We just don’t like it; it’s more parts that could go wrong. The boom also is attached to a rigid strut, and not a proper boom vang, so the idea of “blowing the vang” isn’t an option. David is a main trimmer and a racer, and he really didn’t like the limited capabilities of this system.

Replacing this boom is a challenge, because you have to get a new boom (usually have one made) and a new main sail (usually have one made), and all the parts that go on the main and the boom. I think you are starting to get the point here – this is an expensive problem.

Our friend Jim on the east coast bought a Sabre 402 within a week of us buying ours. I “met” Jim on the Sabre owner’s list online, and had told him about our boom replacement situation. The boat he bought has an in-boom furling system on it too, and he knew we were planning on doing the replacement. So, when he discovered his boat came with the original Hall boom and the original main sail, he grabbed both of them for us. We bought both from him at a huge Sabre-friend discount, then the challenge was getting them to the west coast.

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The boom itself is close to 18′ and about 85 pounds. And it was in Connecticut. I called in a friend favor from Raychel, and she picked the boom up, took it home, packaged it all up for shipping, and took it to a boatyard nearby. Our amazing broker called her amazing boat trucker, and he stuck it on the side of a boat he was bringing to Anacortes Washington. I found a guy who picked it up the Saturday after it arrived in Anacortes and trucked it to Bay Marine in Point Richmond, the place where we’re having the boom replacement done.

Working for a sailmaker himself, Jim was able to inspect our new/old main and get it shipped to Quantum in Point Richmond, where it’s being very slightly worked on (the sail itself was in fantastic shape). All in all, we spent around $1k total to get the parts for the new system, including shipping. Bonus points include being able to resell the system that’s on there for more than we paid for the replacements, plus our boat will be happier because we’re putting her back the way she’s supposed to be.

Sometimes it takes a village to get boat projects accomplished!

The boom swap project is well underway, thanks to Facebook Messenger, Rolfe and Chris at Bay Marine, Ryan at Rogue Rigging, Will at Quantum and Hippie James. Thankful for knowing all the players. I wouldn’t have any clue where to start doing this project here in Port Townsend.

It was a dark and stormy night…

Not really, but sounded good. So there we were awake at 230a on the Friday morning after we closed on the boat purchase. We already had a long list of stuff that we wanted to change on the boat. We had seen our friends who live on a 42′ boat in Alameda earlier that week, and they mentioned that Marina Village in Alameda had 8 open liveaboard slots available. This is unheard of… it’s usually a very long waitlist to get a 40-42′ slip, much less getting a liveaboard. Add to that the adrenaline of just having made a large purchase and we start talking.

D – “You know, we just bought a cruising boat and we’re heading back up to Port Townsend on Sunday.”

K – “Yeah, I know. I was just thinking about bringing the boat back up to the PNW and all the work we need to do on her. We don’t have the group of sailing people, the people to work on the boat, not to mention our friends like we do in the Bay Area.”

D – “I was just thinking about all of that too. What do you think about coming back to the Bay Area and moving onto the boat? We can get a liveaboard slip in Alameda. I realized earlier that I can make more money working just 10 hours a week in the Bay Area than I can working an entire month in Port Townsend.”

K – “But, I want to go cruising in the PNW, and I really want to do that Alaska roundtrip.”

D – “We can come back to the PNW first. That could be our shakedown cruise to see if the internet/working thing will work for you. And we can start cruising from there.”

K – “OK, sounds good, let’s do it. We’re both in our 50’s, and it’s time, because if we don’t we may never. Let’s get this show on the road.”

As my Uncle Pat, who is just 6 years older than me and currently “cruising” on a motorcycle says, “If not now, when?”

Absolutely. So, mid-October, we’re going back, but not backward… actually a huge leap forward.

Post Persuasion Equation discussions, we make an offer on the boat in Emeryville CA. I cannot believe after all of this, after traveling to South Carolina, after living in Port Townsend, we’re making an offer on a boat that’s in our previous backyard, but that’s how things work sometimes. The good thing is that having the boat down there, we can easily bring her back up to the PNW where we live.

One thing to note about living in Port Townsend is that it’s RURAL. I mean, RURAL RURAL. It takes us 2+ hours to get to the airport from here, which is a little bit more time than it takes to fly to Oakland from Seattle. Frankly, it’s a hassle to go to the airport. By purchasing a boat that’s not here, that means we have to fly a few times to look at the boat, sail the boat, survey the boat, and finally buy the boat.

The test sail is scheduled for Monday May 31, and the survey is scheduled for Tuesday June 15. David and I fly down to the Bay Area Thursday evening, and we get to reunite with all our friends whom we haven’t seen since September 2020. Also, David officially retired on June 1, so we have a retirement “party” with more friends where David announces his retirement.

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On Monday, we take the boat out on a windy but beautiful day. It’s not clear the last time this boat has been out, but it’s been a while because nothing works on her. We can’t get the main sail up all the way. We can’t pull the jib out because it’s overridden. The traveler doesn’t work. Basically, we never do take her sailing, so she fails the test sail. But, still we forge along because all of this is stuff we can fix.

I fly back to the Bay Area for the survey on Tuesday, June 15. The survey goes well, with some minor issues and one major issue, but still not a huge deal. We can fix all of it. And then, as we leave the yard, the engine won’t start. We have to leave the boat at the yard and hitch a ride with the other broker back to our cars. But, still we forge along because all of this is stuff we can fix.

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I’m giggling to myself now, because we are still going to buy this boat.

The negotiation on the purchase took 6 weeks, 2 of which included us being back in the Bay Area for David’s spring break and crashing out on Dustin and Holly’s airbed in Point Richmond. Finally, on Saturday July 3, we turned the engine over on Pru402 and moved her to Richmond Yacht Club from Emeryville.

It made sense to have the same delivery crew that moved Old Pru from Alameda to RYC. We toasted, we sailed, and we put her into her new slip without hitting anything. Even Ernie doesn’t seem bothered by her, as he wandered all the way to the bow of the boat (he hated walking on the decks of Mid-Pru).

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And then, just like that, the party was over and we had to headed back to Port Townsend on Sunday, leaving our beautiful new boat behind.

Back in 2018 when we first started looking at buying a Sabre 36, David’s brother Mike told us about “Persuasion”, a 1989 Sabre 36 that was located in Manchester, MA. This boat was beautiful. All lines were led to the cockpit, the canvas was new, the upholstery was new. Everything on this boat had been redone. Mike had maintained this boat throughout the years, so the electrical was in fantastic shape. And, given it was a New England boat, she didn’t spend a lot being sailed either (half of her time in the yard). So, she may have been a 1989, but she’d only been sailed like she was a 2015.

The owner wanted $89k for her. Shipping from the east coast would have been $15k at the time. That was more than we wanted to spend on a sailboat at the time – a lot more – so we decided against Persuasion.

Then, we found Austral, and shipped her down from Seattle to the Bay Area. We paid $49k for Austral, and it was $8k total to get her to the Bay Area.

We used the Persuasion sales brochure as our guide on how to upgrade our new Sabre 36. Ultimately, we spend $20k more upgrading Prudence than we would have had we just bought Persuasion and shipped her west. And still, Prudence wasn’t where Persuasion was when we sold Prudence.

So… the Persuasion Equation tells us that buying the less expensive boat isn’t always the right decision. It really depends on what needs to be done on the boat you are looking at. In the case of the 402s, we were looking at the less expensive option in Hilton Head, but ultimately the Bay Area boat was going to be the better choice because it was going to cost us less overall.

Last we heard, Persuasion’s owner still owns the boat. It probably was good for him that he didn’t sell her to us anyway.

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In mid-May 2021, we flew to Charleston. We had made an accepted offer on a 2001 Sabre 402 that was located in Hilton Head, SC, and we were going back there to look at her.

This trip was two-fold: David grew up in Charleston, and hadn’t been back in many years. And I had many nieces and nephews I had never met, and I had never been to Charleston. We spent 36 hours running around Charleston, seeing the Civil War era submarine “CSS Hunley”, and even went to a house party before we headed down to Hilton Head. We also had a lovely time spending a night with Sally, David’s mom.

The boat we were looking at was our first time on a Sabre 402, other than the pulled apart one at Dustin’s shop from a few years earlier. The older couple that owned her had bought her new and cruised her for 20 years up and down the east coast. There were some DIY-type issues we had with her, but really didn’t think anything would be any issues for us. After all, we are also DIY kind of people, and we knew we could pretty much surmount any issues that we ran across.

The other fun part of this trip is that our broker, Allison, who we’d known for many years through Richmond Yacht Club, had since become a close friend of ours, so we were doing this trip with Allison. It’s always fun having a trip with friends, especially when it involves sailboats.

Hilton Head is VERY DIFFERENT sailing territory than the San Francisco Bay Area!

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Hilton Head is an interesting place. It is mostly developed neighborhoods on a very thin island on the edge of South Carolina. It’s a short drive away from Savannah, Georgia. The weather was fantastic while we were there, not too hot, and just the right humidity. I was surprised to find out that during the Civil War, this island was the base of operations for the Union blockade of the Southern ports. Once the Union took the island, hundreds of ex-slaves moved to the island, where they could buy land and go to school. I wish we’d had more time to explore, but we were there specifically for the survey, which was happening the day after we arrived on Saturday.

On Sunday, we left the slip early and headed out for a test sail into the Intracoastal Waterway. Since I’d never been to this part of the country and had never seen the ICW, I was excited about this test sail – first sail on a 402 and first sail on the ICW. There was almost no wind, but after motoring for a while, David detected some wind off in the distance. We went over there, and picked up just enough to pull the sails and feel the boat.

This boat can SAIL, and beautifully at that!

The test sail was wonderful, and we were hooked. This was the boat we wanted.

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The following day, we took the boat over to the haulout. Haulouts and yards are not very plentiful in this part of the country. The surveyor showed up from Charleston, and started his job along with his bag from Dunkin’ Donuts. I made a comment about the bag, and he said “of course, I’m from New England, gotta have Dunkin’ Donuts.” When I asked where, he said Gloucester, which is where my sister and brother in law live. When I asked if he knew Mike, he said “THE MIKE PARKER???” and I said yes, the one who works at Manchester Marine. Amazingly enough, Nick the Surveyor knew Mike and had grown up with my niece. Sailing… where you can go anywhere and know someone.

The boat was passing muster, and nothing really was a surprise until we pulled her out of the water. There were a couple of serious issues that were found during the survey that we were just not willing to deal with and didn’t want to fix along with the cost of shipping the boat to the west coast and the other issues we had already known about. It was at that point that we sadly decided to pull out of the contract and walk away from this boat. I had never had a survey go south before, though I hadn’t done that many surveys on boats anyway. Up to now, I believed that nothing could knock David and I off of any boat, but there were a few issues on this boat that knocked her out of contention.

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A strange thing happened on the way to this point though. The 402 down in the Bay Area had dropped in price to within our range. It was still expensive (to us), but not much more than this boat would have been with shipping.

At that point, I started calculating the Persuasion Equation, and after talking with David realized we were better off buying the boat in the Bay Area.