Saturday was a day

We had another open house.  Apparently, there were quite a few people going trough the place and, today, we had another showing.  It really comes down to people seeing the place until the right one sees it.

In other news, we downgraded on the car Friday night.  I traded in my 2005 BMW Z4 (yyeeeeeeehaaaaaaa!  Zooooom!!) for a brand new Smart Car (beep!).  This saves us about half the car payment and I'm sure, on insurance.   Now, onto boats.

The SkipJack: Saturday started out with an exploratory look at a 35 foot Skipjack in Tacoma. It was priced at an amazing 29K and was solid as hell.  It was an interesting boat, and worth seeing but, in the end it wasn't for us because the layout just couldn't work for us.  We ended up not figuring out where we could sleep together.

37' Gulfstar in Poulsbo:  This was a typical shoal draft sloop and medium priced at 48K.  We took a serious look at this boat.  It was clean, in good shape and priced well.  Though we did find out it has osmotic hull blistering going on so, right off the bat we would be talking a few thousand dollars to haul her, clean that up, seal the hull and get her back in the water.

After that we decided to head over to Marine Service Center on Westlake.  We walked in the door on 4:40 on a Saturday (they close at 5:00) and ran into Gary.  He was great.  He got information together on the Tartan 37 and the Maple Leaf 48 we were interested in and...we started walking the dock and...

Nauticat 33: As we were walking out to look at a Tartan 37, we stumbled across this; a Nauticat 33.  We both stopped and said, "gee that's a nice boat but the Nauticats have been out of our price range."

"Really?  It's only 99K," Gary replied.  Well, we looked at each other in amazement while Gary got the keys.  Climbing aboard we were amazed at the pilot-house design.  All the gauges were right in the house, along with all the electrical systems and the controls. You can literally sail this boat from inside.  Granted, it's a motorsailer more towards the motor end of the spectrum than I usually look at but, it had plenty of sail and Gary said it actually sailed pretty well.  So we looked around there for a while and tried to decide if a 33' boat could work for us and, you know, it just might.

Tartan 37:   Decent, like the Gulfstar in accommodations,   systems and performance.  All in all a decent boat for 58K.  That's about all I can say about it.

Can you say Yacht? But then there was the Cooper Maple Leaf. This is a yacht in many senses of the word.  It was huge, inside and out.  Kerry was awed at the space and accommodations inside this thing.  A huge sloop like this will have little problem sailing in the lighter airs of the Puget Sound. As our home, it can also handle larger parties and visitors, so it's clearly on our radar.  

An asking price of 129K is within our range too.

So we had a good day, looking at some interesting boats.  We got a good sense of space and usefulness of these to suit our purposes.   There is nothing like seeing  a lot of boats to get an idea of what will work for us and what will not.

Now, to spend Sunday resting.