I stepped out onto the bow of the little white and gray sailboat into the late afternoon sun. She seemed like the perfect boat for us, there was no question. But still, I wondered. Were we really ready for a new boat? We’d looked at so many boats, how could we know for sure that this was the one? Silently, I asked for a sign and then let the questions go. I admired the sturdy manual anchor windlass and the hefty chain. I noted the fact that this boat had no roller furling. We would have to hank on the headsails. Generally, we liked fewer systems, mechanical or otherwise, but we were pretty fond of the roller furling headsail on our little trailer/sailer. I ran an appreciative hand over the unusually sturdy bow railing, its stainless steel gleamed. With a sigh, I turned my gaze to the surrounding marina. A catamaran lay at the dock across the way, her stern facing directly at me. In large letters across the transom was her name: FAITH.
FAITH at the dock
I first saw PELICAN on a website called Yachtworld. We had been looking for years and had looked at many boats listed there. With the economy being so slow, luxuries like yachts were selling for rock bottom prices. Owners were even giving boats away just to escape from all the maintenance costs. When I saw the listing for PELICAN, my jaw dropped. She seemed to have every single feature we wanted in a boat and some we didn’t even know enough to want.
The features we wanted had evolved over the years. My first boat was a 37-foot liveaboard sailboat with beautiful teak details, an insulated hull and dark green sides. When Eric saw a photo of her, he gasped because she was so pretty. Eric’s background was in canoes, kayaks and small fishing boats from his youth. Shortly before I met him, he bought an adorable 11-foot wooden row/sailboat named CAROL & ZACK.
On one of our first dates, Eric rowed CAROL & ZACK up the Eno River and took me skinny-dipping. We had fun sailing CAROL & ZACK on the pond at Eric’s house and even brought her out to the Neuse River one time, but she was too small for more than two people. I wanted a boat we could take the kids on so we decided to get a bigger boat. He found WILLADINE for us and bought her as an “engagement” boat. We had been talking about possibly getting married and had been looking at rings, but we both agreed that a boat was so much better than a ring. At first, WILLADINE was perfect for us. She was easy to sail, easy to care for and we could stay overnight with my two kids. But it wasn’t long before my son grew too big to sleep on the short settee and staying overnight on the boat got uncomfortable.
The search for the next boat began almost immediately. We looked online. We walked the docks. We finagled tours of every boat we saw. Eric read online forums and books about boats and together we began to refine our requirements and desires for the next boat. We also talked extensively about what we wanted to do on the next boat: live aboard. A key development in our search came when Eric discovered a cruising couple whose philosophies of sailing we both grew to admire.
Lin and Larry Pardey have sailed over 200,000 miles together in engineless wooden boats they built themselves. Their “less-is-more” philosophy is right in line with our thinking about boats. I bought their book, Self-Sufficient Sailor, and Eric and I took turns reading chapters aloud to each other at bedtime. Some of our favorite chapters are: Under Sail Without an Engine, If You Can’t Repair it, Maybe it Shouldn’t Be On Board and, Free the Galley Slave.
Meanwhile we sailed WILLADINE just about every weekend and looked at boats when the weather wasn’t good enough for sailing. We looked at 25-foot boats. We looked at 42-foot boats. We looked at sinking derelicts, mildewed hurricane victims and charmless production boats. I fell hopelessly in love with a 35-foot dark-hulled beauty named EN PASSANT.
My beloved, but flawed beauty
Unfortunately, she had a fatally flawed hull and I went into deep mourning for her.
For a while, we gave up boat shopping. I was too bruised and disappointed by the “loss” of EN PASSANT, to look at any other boats. I didn’t think I would ever find a boat as perfect and pretty as EN PASSANT. I was devastated. After a month or so had passed, Eric gently suggested we might go and look at a few more boats, ones we had seen online before EN PASSANT. I held out no hope, but I thought it might be fun just to look. Mainly, I wanted to see the water and I didn’t want to sail WILLADINE. Sailing WILLADINE had been poisoned somehow by the EN PASSANT debacle and I couldn’t face her.
Eric sent me some links to boats on Yachtworld. We had narrowed our search by this time so that we were looking at boats from 30 to 40 feet. We wanted to spend about $30,000, but we looked at boats listed anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000. It was a buyer’s market. Sellers were desperate. We knew we could bargain. When I called the broker to ask about seeing the boat, he was full of cautions. “Now, this boat is just bare bones,” he said.
“She’s exactly what we’re looking for,” I said.
“She doesn’t a head,” he said.
“Perfect,” I said.
“No inboard engine,” he said.
Did he think we hadn’t read the listing? “
She’s exactly what we’re looking for,” I repeated with a tinge of irritation.
Normally, these yacht brokers fall all over themselves to show you every boat they have listed. But this guy hedged. He would call the owner and see if he could arrange a showing. I told him rather firmly that we’d be visiting the coast that weekend and wanted to look at her as soon as possible. He said he’d call me back. Since I didn’t hear from him right away (later we found out that the owner, Ted, was out at Cape Lookout and the delay was not the broker’s fault), I arranged to look at boats in Southport and Morehead City. We made a tour of Coastal North Carolina looking at boats and places to keep boats (marinas).
In Morehead City, we stood at a back-alley dock gazing at a Hunter sailboat (same make as WILLADINE). While waiting for the owners to arrive, Eric confessed to really liking this boat and having a vivid fantasy of owning her. Something about her didn’t appeal to me at first look, but I tried to keep an open mind.
The owners arrived and we exchanged pleasantries and climbed aboard. Her decks were clean and the boat seemed well maintained. They were only asking $15,000, so we knew we could have this boat for a song. Down below she was dark and contained some of that awful wood-grained laminate I have grown to detest. Still, I tried to keep an open mind. She did have a quarter-berth (bed in the stern for the kids), which was one of my requirements. Curious to see how it was to lie in, I stretched out to climb into the bunk. Immediately, a board crashed down and I slammed into the trim with my thigh. The owner heard the noise and came running, full of concern. My thigh was on fire, tears were in my eyes and I’d had the breath knocked out of me. Gasping, I reassured him that I was fine (I was not! I had a seven-inch bruise on my thigh that took weeks to heal) and said I hoped I had not broken the bunk. Turned out that the board supporting the edge of the quarter-berth bunk was held up with just a strap and a snap. Apparently, he’d left it unsnapped and when I put my weight on it, it fell to the floor.
All I could think about as we continued to look around the boat was, that boat BIT me! It was absolutely clear to me this was not our boat. Love bites are one thing, I’d had plenty of those from WILLADINE, but this boat gave me a rather sharp warning. I limped around and made a show of looking, but I was really just wishing for a large ice pack to stem the pain in my thigh. It was a relief to finally get out of there.
During all our looking, Friday and Saturday, I had waited for a call from PELICAN’s broker. It was obvious that he didn’t want to show us the boat that weekend. He was in Florida at a trade show, which we took as a good sign. We didn’t want to meet the broker anyway. We wanted to meet the owner because they always know the boat the best. Fortunately, Ted made it back to Bridgeton (across the river from New Bern) in time to show us the boat Sunday afternoon.
We loved Ted and we loved the boat. We felt incredibly lucky to have gotten this boat. Everywhere we go, people ask us about her. She has tanbark (red) sails, so we are always the prettiest boat on the water. It was one of our dreams for our new boat, to be in town with the boat at anchor and have someone ask, “Which boat is yours?”
To which we would reply with a sly smile, “The pretty one.”
