Nautical Chronicles

NAUTICAL CHRONICLES:

Saying “Goodbye”

They say that the two happiest days in a boater’s life are when we buy a boat, and when we sell a boat. They also say that a boat is just a huge hole in the water where we can dump our money. All we can say is, “They must not be boaters”.

In our twenty years of boating, we’ve found the happiest days to be in between the buying and the selling; and since we gain so much enjoyment from boating, putting cash toward updating and maintaining our purchases has never been much of an issue.

Now we find ourselves in between what they call our two happiest days, and what we call our saddest. My mate and I said goodbye to our beloved 46’ Post Sportfish, “HalfMine”. After a couple of years on the market and nine seasons of ownership, the inevitable happened; she sold to a nice young couple in Maryland. Ironically, one of our goals was to cruise her to the Chesapeake Bay and visit Red Eye’s Dock Bar in Grasonville, MD where she would be shown off with all the go-fast boats and other cruisers. Now she will make that trip, just with another captain and crew. She’s already had her windows fully tinted and is scheduled for a new Awl-Grip refinishing, soda-blasting and barrier coating of her hull, and a new EZ2CY helm enclosure, all things we could not provide for her in our retirement years. We will miss her, but she’s found a good home.

We are not, however, boat-less; just big-boat-less. We continue to enjoy our Achilles inflatable and our 16’ Sunbird Neptune with the Evinrude E-Tec 90, but we have found them to be “uncomfortable” to sleep on, and the stereo system doesn’t begin to compare to our Bose 151’s with the amplifier and sub-woofers. We are spending much more time on other people’s boats (what “they” call the best boats).

But…we are back searching the marketplace for our next boat. Unfortunately, early-on in our search, we have discovered two critical components to this endeavor: for the first time in our boating career, we don’t know what we want (we need to down-size, not up-size); and this time we…are…spoiled! Our list of “necessities” is extensive, based on our past “needs”: diesel vs. gas motors, fly bridge vs. express, being able to see out of the helm enclosure while underway, being able to see the dock to our stern while backing into a slip, AC/heat, generator, invertor, full-size fridge, washer/dryer, separate shower(s), built-in vacuum system, and a killer entertainment/sound system. Recognizing this, we now see how spoiled we’ve become, and how far from our original boating entertainment we’ve gotten.

“Back then”, when we bought our first “HalfMine”, a 22’ Four Winns 225 Sundowner cuddy, we loved that boat as much as the one we just said goodbye to. We spent many over-nights on board, we traveled with a cooler and had to move the bed to use the porta-potty. We had a VHF radio, added a new stereo and had no GPS. We learned to use paper charts, parallel rules, dividers and our compass. We learned “dead reckoning” and we learned boating experience, mostly through the mistakes we made. And we learned what we wanted (not necessarily needed) in our next boat.

“Back then”, we were averaging 100-150 hours per season on the ocean, traveling and exploring the near-coastal waters from Bar Harbor to New York City; gas prices were in the $1 per gallon range. Then we began developing our plan to retire; we would buy a big boat, travel to Lighthouse Point in Florida for the winters and return back to the Merrimack River in the summers. We found the big boat, and for the past ten seasons we had learned to cruise with her, in preparation for our adventure trip to Florida. When we said goodbye to this “HalfMine” last month, my mate said that that boat was our dream. I replied that the boat was only part of the dream, and that we bought it to follow our dream to Florida. Things change and dreams change and we now realize this fact. We also know that we have, today, far more than what we had when we first dreamed up that plan. And we’ve always known that there is nothing wrong with a half-baked idea, as long as it is still cooking.

Last week, we looked at a 2003, 38’ Silverton convertible named “Done Dreaming”; we liked everything about the boat, just not the name. Also, it was only located in New Jersey, so the trip from there to the Merrimack River would not be that much of an adventure. We are now hoping to find our next big boat (“HalfMine”) in Florida while on vacation there for the month of March. If we do, we will buy it, fly back down and take a leisurely trip back north; it will just be in the opposite direction of our original plan. After all, we are “Never Done Dreaming”, and the idea is still cooking. We will keep you informed as we continue our journey.

Or, like we always say, “Nothing is quite as much fun as learning something new”, so… though we may not have enough patience, maybe, just maybe, we will try SAILING!

Captain Robert Brown

First Mate Louise