Buyers Market (Old Post 4-13-12)

This past Friday (4-13-12) we drove into Annapolis and dropped off some of our worn running rigging at the West Marine store on Hillsmere Drive.  They offer a rigging service and several of our lines needed eyes at one end.  The dude who usually does this was off that day so his apprentice took over for him.  This is a young guy, mid twenty's, who's only been working there for a year.  He offered to splice the eyes in the double braided lines and whip the ends.  My only other option was to use plastic clamps which might be plenty strong but just don't have that "good seamanship" look.  I took my chances with the kid.  The lines we replaced were the roller furling for the Genoa, the Mainsail out-haul and the Staysail roller furling, sheet and out-haul.  We used single braid line for the roller furling and Sta-Set X double braid for everything else.  In less than 90 minutes the kid had everything finished up and I gotta say I was very impressed.  He whipped the ends of all the lines, running a needle down through the center in four places to prevent the core from slipping.  The eyes were spliced in neatly and he explained to me that the whipping he added on the splice was really just for looks since the friction of the splice was plenty strong enough on it's own.  The "kid", Mike Johnson, does extremely nice work and I highly recommend him.

We spent most of Saturday getting the boat cleaned up in anticipation of some buyers coming the following morning.  This qualifies for our Spring cleaning so we pretty much killed two birds with one stone.  I washed the boat topsides then polished and waxed all the smooth surfaces using McGuire's products.  The tricky part was doing the transom since the boat is in the water and we have our dock lines crossed in back.  The transom is what's called a "sugar scoop" and provides a narrow step that's used for a swim platform and easy access to the dinghy.  It is pretty narrow though and requires hanging onto the railing with one hand while polishing with the other with 90% of your weight hanging out over the water.  Good circus act for young folks but miserable work for an old geezer like me.  Cheri cleaned things down below and then helped me with the topside chores by adding a fresh coat of teak oil to the eyebrow and toe rail.

Sunday morning we staged the boat with some nice music quietly playing in the main salon and the movie "Ratatouille" showing silently in the forward stateroom.  We left the boat with high hopes of a good showing because our broker had told us the people were local and he thought we had a good chance.  We drove into town and took care of some chores then headed back to the marina with the intention of sitting in the shade and enjoying a nice cigar while we waited.  As we were getting out of the car we got a call saying they were done looking at the boat (after about 45 minutes).  That's not a good sign.  Their broker saw us in the parking lot and walked over for a talk.  After asking a few questions about the history of the boat she mentioned that it was about $100k higher than what they had been looking at and Cheri and I both mentally wrote off our labor as wasted time.

Aside from the disappointment we had a beautiful day, mid 80's with a nice breeze, and it was only 2 in the afternoon.  We decided the best thing we could do was to go for a short sail.  We had the boat outside the breakwater by 3 and enjoyed the nicest day-sail we've had in a long time.  Out on the Bay the wind was pretty steady at 16 to 18 knots out of the WSW.  We sailed out towards Poplar Island (click here) at 6.5 knots on a broad reach and midway into the shipping channel, just past G4, we came about and headed home.  The return run was close hauled at 6.5 knots, running into the wind so we donned our jackets.  We had a direct run all the way into Herring Bay where the wind got kinda funky and we furled the sails and motored the rest of the way home.  Just a short 3 hour sail but it lifted our spirits and turned out to be the just what we needed.

Once we were back in our slip we had just finished hooking up shore power when we got a call from our broker.  He said the showing had gone really well and the folks were extremely pleased with the boat and planned to put in an offer.  Wow!  Guess we read that one wrong!  It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

In the meantime we're still moving ahead with our plans.  We decided a while ago that it wouldn't pay to put things on hold while we tried to sell the boat.  Nothing is certain until the ink is dry and you have money in hand.  If nothing comes from this showing then we still plan to take our vacation, whether it's doing the DelMarVa or just taking a few weeks on the hook.  I'm still working on getting the electronics installed.  I knew this was going to turn into a marathon at the end.  We called MTS before we left for San Diego and contracted with them to get the radar mounted on the mast.  They finally got it done yesterday (4-16-12) and I'm really pleased with how it came out.  I still need to put in the circuit breaker for the radar but should be able to get that done this weekend.