Seeing A Man About A Boat

  D INSISTED that I use that title. Actually, all four of us saw a man about a boat. Our friend Bill is acting as the selling agent for someone who has already PCS'd and he brought the boat to the dock for us on Monday morning. D and I have talked many, many times about buying a boat here and each time we decide not to, but we're giving this boat some serious consideration. It's called Down East Trader and it's a 38-foot Northeast (LeComte 1968). It's the right size for our family and in our price range. It had a major haul out and re-fit done in 2005 but not much work has been done since then.
   On one hand, it would be nice to own something here. The American Dream of ownership is still pretty deeply instilled in us and since we can't own a home here, this boat would be something like a surrogate home- something we could put time and money into and get joy out of. On the other hand, we have two children under three that take up most of our time already and buying this boat would use up a lot of our "move back to the US" money, money we've saved to buy cars and put a down payment on a house if we ever leave here.
   We're vacilating. It's such a good deal and it would be nice to have the freedom that a sailboat can give and we'd love to teach the kids to sail, but...

For some reason, we didn't take a picture of the whole boat on Monday morning. This is one from the 2005 haul out.

 

Looking forward from the cockpit

The V-berth in the bow of the boat

Looking out from the V-berth

The head

Looking back towards the V-berth and the head from the saloon (like how I'm throwing out those boating terms? Makes it sound like I know what I'm talking about, doesn't it?)

The kitchen area and companionway

The nav-station and companion way. Behind the nav-station is a pocket berth and storage (both the settees in the saloon can be used as berths as well.

The engine, a marine diesel rebuilt in 2005