First Flight of First Light

The plan had been to spend one more day in New Bern, meet some old cruising friends for dinner, blow that pop stand the next morning and head to Oriental. But this morning's check of the weather suggested that today was the day for making good our escape. A few phone calls later and new plans were made for having the car catch up to us. With goodbyes said and hands shaken with the folks at Duck Creek (who have been as helpful as they could be for the last year) we headed down the dock to get underway for the first time in just shy of 4 years.

First sunrise on First Light. And a beautiful first light it was.
One of the reasons we love the boat name and didn't change it.

We scurried around trying to remember all the “heading out” chores that needed done, and to figure out which ones apply to trawlers. Obviously uncovering the sails and running the sheets and halyards wouldn't be necessary. Engine oil checks? Yep, x 2 though all the fluids were changes yesterday so that seemed redundant. Still, Deb suggested I look over the engine room anyway. I did: and put away the fan that had been left in there, stowed a half bottle of coolant sitting by the port engine, picked up some stray wiring, and moved a tool box back to where it belongs. Pre-engine start engine room check is now on the departure “must do” list. Then we talked over how we were going get out of the slip, down the creek and into the Neuse River. It has been a while since we reviewed nautical charts.

Painting the stripe is very very high up on the Captain's to-do list.

 

When we couldn't come up with anything else needing done, I fired up the engines(!) while Deb pulled in the lines. A few bumps forward with the shifter levers, a few bumps back, and we cleared the dock without much ado. It was a slow and careful crawl down the creek as, along with the gen-set, the depth gauge that had worked during the sea trial stayed dark and dead in the panel. First Light draws less than four feet, but it is still spooky poking along without knowing just how much water is under the keel. A cool thing was that the upper chart plotter, which didn't work yesterday, lit up this morning without hesitation. RADAR! For the first couple of miles the helm felt very weird. Hydraulic steering takes a little getting used to. What took zero time to get used to was bringing the auto-pilot on line and just punching in the required headings. At some point we will figure out how to make it track a route, but for now, after the years of wrestling Kintala's wheel for hours at a time, heading hold was more than enough of a giggle.

The Neuse taught us some pretty harsh lessons in the past. More than once we limped into Oriental beat up, broken, and looking for a place to hide. But today? Today was as perfect a day as one could have for first trip in a new-to-us boat. Traffic was light, as were the winds. The slightest swell rolled under the bow while wavelets from the port side didn't move the boat at all. After the truncated, rigging-blocked view from the aft end of Kintala, the expanse of water visible over the bow of First Light was nothing short of amazing. At one point a King Pelican took flight off our bow. The only thing missing was a visit from a dolphin, welcoming us home. The hours strolled by as some of the very best we have ever enjoyed on a boat. It was hard to grasp that we made it, that we were back on the water and moving at our own pace.

 

 

 

Back in the day, when a marina came into view, the adrenaline started to flow and the brow started to furrow. Getting Kintala onto anything but a face dock in a calm wind was far more luck than skill. As great a sailing boat as she was, docking was a nightmare. Backing into a slip was generally completely out of the question. In fact, as I sit writing this and looking at the boats around us (with one exception) the only ones stern-to are trawlers and catamarans. And I know why. Deb talked me into the marina and down the right fairway. We counted slips and spotted an empty one that looked to be ours between a Lagoon 40 Cat and that stray sailboat parked stern-to. Today there was a little wind blowing but it made no difference. First Light obeyed my commands without complaint, eased back into the slip and stopped right where I asked. Deb set a couple of lines to hold the boat still, I shut off the engines, we set fenders, added lines, hooked up to shore power, and called our first trip a complete success.

For the next couple of days we will enjoy one of our favorite towns from our previous cruising days, get some more work done on the boat, and marvel at just how lucky we have been. 

The reflections from the sun on the water in the cabins is one of the things I missed most
when we returned to land. It's amazing how much these little things all add up to make
this life as wonderful as it is.

First Night on First Light

This is our third St. Louis to New Bern foray. A good part of it is a nice drive through the Blue Ridge mountains, this time with some of the trees just starting to turn. It was a reminder that seasons change. Though it will be a while yet, it certainly feels like a seasonal change is in the works for our lives as well. We are boat owners again, and are working toward spending a lot of time on the water. It must be admitted that our little car didn't enjoy the trip. Loaded as it was with tools, dishes, hardware, parts, more tools and more parts, hauling that load up the mountains had our little engine howling in protest and put a good dent in our usually impressive MPG.

It was 15 hours worth of “nice drive” with a New Bern arrival time of 10 pm. We elected to spend the night in a hotel and start our first full day on First Light fresh. Since we would be in the hotel for less than half a day, most of the stuff would stay in the car with just a few bags and musical instruments going inside with us. Almost to the front door, I remembered that we needed one more bag for the night. I headed back to grab it while Deb checked us in. As usual, I had backed into parking places because the scraping noise that comes from the bow when the curb is too high makes me wince. Said bag was in the trunk. It was dark and I was tired so it didn't register that the ground was really soft as I popped the lid and started to rummage around. Soft, because I was standing in the middle of a giant ant metropolis with a population likely larger than that of New York City. Those little buggers took offense at me stomping through their world, swarmed my Keens, and tried to encourage me to depart at once.

They succeeded.

Just as I closed the trunk I felt the first little prick of hurt, Moments later I danced into the parking lot with bag in hand and feet on fire; dropped the bag, shed the Keens, and started sweeping the little demons off my skin. Staggering into the lobby barely able to walk was a bit of a show. Now in the light I could find the few remaining assault troops still chewing their way into my nervous system, popped a Benadryl Deb keeps on hand, and limped up to the room. (A good bee sting can put me down for days. The Benadryl was an at-hand, hope-it-works-if-there-is-a-problem kind of thing.) While I iced my burning feet, Deb ran to the local store to get some med spray and bandaids. It all helped, and by midnight I was in bed after an 19-hour day.

The next morning, we rolled into the Marina for a third time as owners of a new-to-us boat. Day one was spent finding our way around, getting some things cleaned up, and starting a new to-do list. We put up the shower cap, (big cover that goes over the fly bridge.) It was at least as much of a job as was putting up the bimini and dodger on Kintala. Then we figured out a way to get power on the boat. Man, has it been a while. The big power plug had no match on the pole. Oh yeah, there is an adapter thing that goes from big to small, plugging the boat into a regular looking socket. But that doesn't carry a lot of amps so careful selection of what went on and what when off was necessary. Fridge and battery changer only. The boat's batteries are toast but, with the charger running at least we have some light. There is a pallet full of new batteries to be installed, a task for later. A couple of pieces of furniture got tossed off the boat with the help of a couple of young yard workers. A few other odds and ends were accomplished.

So, I sit here in our new salon, first night on First Light. First impressions....

The interior of this thing, compared to Kintala, is massive. Not quite as big as the two room apartment that is our land-side home, but for a boat? There are big picture windows all around. At the moment all they look out on is boats on the hard in various stages of repair or decay. But it isn't hard to imagine the view in No Name Harbor or Crab Key. The forward cabin looks to be twice that of Kintala's V-berth. Two people can fit in the galley without rubbing (Deb says she's not sure that's a good thing...) The lower steering station seems a bit tight. But it is still bigger than that on Kintala, and it is INSIDE. 

There is a big-screen TV that is tied to some kind of magic box that actually has stations on it. Weird. We haven't had any kind of commercial TV in our lives for nearly 20 years. A quick run through stations I've never heard of was all it took to convince me that we haven't missed anything. But there was also a DVD player and Deb and I like to watch movies. Since moving to Kintala all such watching was on a tiny screen. But this big screen came with the boat so why not give it a try? Deb bought a DVD while at the store picking up some other stuff so we could see if the DVD worked at all. There was a total rat's nest of wiring, TV, DVD player, router, power strips. One would think tie-wraps are some kind of state secret. There are also two different remote controls. I haven't had one of those in my living space for nearly a decade. Now I have two. So we ate dinner and watched John Wick off a bunch of bad guys because they stole his car and killed his dog. 

Pure cartoon violence, BANG...BOOM...SMACK...GRRR...we got a couple of good laughs. Then we hit the shower, I put some more goo on my still-aching feet, and it is time to call it a day. It was a good day, and holds promise of more good days to come.

Can't beat that.

The Boat Purchase Circa 2021

Ed Note: This is a longish post about the whole buying process for our new trawler First Light. The detailed information has been requested by many folks also looking, so bear with the history lesson necessary to explain what buying a trawler looks like in  2021.

The first boat we ever bought, our Compac 27 named Nomad, was our "starter" boat, our learning boat. The Compac was perfect for that since she was a stout, forgiving design. She was already located in the marina where we wanted to be on Carlyle Lake in Illinois, an hour's drive from St. Louis where we lived. The price was a stretch for us at the time, but we decided to proceed anyway. The owner of the boat had properly prepared her for an extended time on the hard because he was away—he left her fully shrink-wrapped and in the care of a local broker who also had a boat in the same marina. We didn't hire a buyer's broker, we didn't do a survey, and the whole transaction took less than two weeks. Boat US insured us even with no survey and no prior experience other than ASA101, ASA103, and ASA 104. Such is the way with less expensive starter boats. Such is the way with boat purchases circa 2008.

The problem with Nomad's purchase going so smoothly is that it left us ill-prepared for the purchase that Kintala would be. We were completely unprepared for the purchase of a serious cruising boat. We had no knowledge of surveys, or big-boat brokers, or over-land transportation, or the types of problems that the many new systems of a serious cruising boat would bring. We were bringing our aviation world expectations into the cesspool of marine world realities. While we made it work, and enjoyed 6 wonderful years of full-time cruising, it cost us dearly—in physical, emotional, and financial hardship. Vowing to try to help others not to make those same mistakes, we wrote How NOT to Buy a Cruising Boat. 

As we sold Kintala and moved back on land to refill the cruising kitty, we began to think about the transition to a trawler. The last year we sailed had been a sort of survey of our future plans. We were asking every trawler operator we could find if they were sailors in the past and how they felt about the transition. To a person they all said they wished they had done it sooner. The plan then was pretty firmly ensconced in our minds as we sold Kintala, but the timing had yet to be determined.

Right before the Covid lockdowns were declared, we took our Trawler School in Biscayne Bay, FL. In fact, the lockdowns were declared while we were anchored in No-Name Harbor enjoying a sundowner. We realized immediately that this would put a wrench in our works, so the plan kind of went on hold till we could see what was happening. Not a bad plan, because more time = more money in the cruising kitty. 

Even as Covid put a damper on the plans for over a year, we began to spend a significant amount of our spare time on Yachtworld again looking for what might be the "perfect" trawler. We realized after the trawler school that it would take some time to decide what style of trawler would fit our lifestyle the best. We were being slow, cautious, and vowing not to repeat the same mistakes detailed so painstakingly in our book.

Once Covid became the New Normal, we started to seriously look around a bit. The market was going insane with all the available boats going to people who had decided that 1) since they had to work remotely anyway due to Covid they could do that from a boat and social distance at the same time and 2) since life was uncertain, to say the least, then maybe they shouldn't put off the dream of living on a boat and should do it now. Boats were being sold sight unseen. Boats were going for over the listing price in bidding wars.

Last year we saw an ad for a Golden Star Sundeck 38 that happened to be in our area. We took the grandkids with us to see it. We liked it, they liked it, and we put an offer in on it. The owner was asking way too much money for it (the insurance company wouldn't insure it for what he was asking for it) and our offer was a lowball one in consideration. He soundly declined the offer and we moved on. (Lesson One from our book—always be prepared to walk away.)

Over the next year, we went to Kentucky Lake to look at a couple boats, did a virtual tour on one in Stuart, FL, and conversed with brokers on several others. At this point I was tiring of the process and I think we were coming to the conclusion that we would just have to wait till the market calmed down a bit. I decided to set up a search alert on Yachtworld, just so that I wouldn't miss something if it came along. A couple months later I got an alert on First Light.  It ticked all the boxes but one, so we decided that it would be worth taking a look at. I talked to the broker less than 24 hours after the listing went live. He explained that we could make an offer sight unseen, then make arrangements to come see the boat and if we didn't like it we could walk away at that point with nothing lost. We put the offer in.

Deciding what to offer is always the purchaser's dilemma. In any sane market, a buyer would offer 10% less than asking price. In this market? We offered the asking price. It was a fair price for the boat, and with a full-price offer we would have more room to negotiate on survey items. The offer was accepted, we made arrangements to go to the boat that weekend, and off we went. As we drove, we talked a lot about the decision. The boat was at the high-end limit of what we were able to spend, but it had everything on it that we would have to have added to a lower-cost boat: radar, solar, AIS, air conditioning, a full-size fridge, the teak was all freshly done, the bottom was freshly painted, it had a brand new dinghy and the exact outboard we would have chosen. I had looked at several boats in the mid-40's to mid-50's that we would have to have spent another 25 grand to get all that installed. Granted, the equipment would be new instead of a few years old, but the amount of work involved and our bones accumulating years made the decision an easy one. The hardest part of the decision was the location of the boat. Having a boat that was that far away was not ideal, but all other things considered we decided it was worth it.

Timing has been a huge question of many prospective buyers, so here is the detailed breakdown of our purchase. The whole purchase process took close to 2 months. We placed the offer in on August 6th and was accepted August 8th. The time delay was due to the fact that the seller was living in Japan at the time. We visited the boat the following weekend and agreed to purchase. The longest delay was in securing a surveyor as many are booked out for 3 months but, after a good many phone calls, we were able to get one to the boat September 1st. The next delay was in waiting for the oil sample reports to come back. By the 4th of September we had all in hand, made our offer for the survey adjustments—which was accepted— and signed the conditional acceptance on the 4th. The buyer's closing statement was signed on September 17th. Insurance was procured on the 17th (another post coming on the insuring process) and the closing was the 22nd.

So here's the takeaway from the whole process:

First of all, I can't say enough good about Lars at Curtis Stokes Yachts. In our case, we didn't have to have a buyer's broker because two of their brokers were co-brokering the boat because the one is new and wanted a more experienced broker to help him through the process. The trainee acted as the listing broker and the more experienced broker acted as the buyer's broker. In every step of the process he was professional, courteous, responded immediately to all of my questions, and followed through on all the actions necessary to close the sale. In addition to that, he acted as the captain on our sea trial and did one of the most amazing jobs of piloting a boat in close quarters that I have ever seen. It was clear that Curtis Stokes has very high standards and trains their brokers well. The customer service was unparalleled.

Second, Kathy, the office manager of the marina where the boat was—Duck Creek Marina in New Bern, NC—was hugely responsible for how smoothly the purchase went. As a customer service manager for nearly 30 years, customer service is the most important aspect of any interaction I have with a place, and Kathy took it to new levels of competence. She was ever so patient with my questions, and there were many. I can't stress how important it is to have good, capable people to deal with in any purchase, but especially long-distance ones.

Third, be sure to write down all of your questions as you think of them. When you are at the boat with many distractions, you will forget. Carry around a small notebook and pen with you and write down everything. What you need to do, what you need to ask, what you need to buy. Be sure to get a specific timeline from the broker on what is expected of you. Make no assumptions, and be proactive. You are your best advocate in the purchase of your boat.

Fourth, just a list of some of the steps/considerations/requirements involved in buying a boat for those of you for whom it's a first time:

• The offer
• The acceptance of the offer
• The visit to the boat
• The Purchase and Sale Agreement (PSA)
• Deposit funds transfer (usually 10% of purchase price)
• The survey: hull, mechanical, rigging (if sail), fluid analysis
• Fluid analysis if not included in the mechanical survey
• A boat history report
• Survey allowance offer (amount reduced from offer for items on survey that require attention)
• Buyer's closing statement
• Insurance procurement
• Funds transfer to escrow
• Closing
• State sales tax
• Local sales tax (not required in some states like NC)
• Personal property tax (done by county and city both in NC so some marinas have both and some only have county)
• State registration
• USCG documentation
• Dinghy registration
• Dinghy sales tax

Making yourself a checklist is a great idea. I have a multi-section, spiral-bound notebook that I used with one section dedicated to each item I needed to take care of. This gave me plenty of room to make notes on phone calls with prospective vendors to deal with each item.

Navigating a boat purchase can be difficult. Find well-qualified people that you can work with, be detail-oriented and proactive and hopefully it will all go smoothly.

Now I get to start the Boat Projects section in the notebook...