Happy New Year, y'all (being a southerner for the last 25+ years, I can get
away with that. Since I'll be off and running over the annual changeover, I
have to be premature about it)

Here's the latest on what's happening chez nous for those hanging on my
every word (yup, all three of them!)...

"Skip Gundlach" wrote in
message ink.net...
Greetings...

"Frank Maier" wrote in message
om...

Congratulations! Sounds like you've definitely found a winner. Now all
ya gotta do is obtain an excellent example for a reasonable price and

But, we're continuing our due diligence, and exploring options. We'll
likely make a dash through the territories to visit the ones which have
the
most promise, and offer shortly after, early next month.

We're going to do a very abbreviated dash. It will be through two locales
in FL, only, over New Year's eve and the following couple of days.

As is our wont, our last few holiday and weekend days have been spent in
review of video, reports, layouts (including one set of copies of the
original plans on one boat type) and our preferences, needs, and fantasies.
After winnowing those which *could* work for us down to 4 top candidates, we
then reviewed just what it was which motivated us the most and least about
each. In the end, we decided to eliminate all the others and concentrate on
the Morgan 46 class, without limiting the choices by specifying hull or rig,
as each had their own benefits.

Before that, I'd made contact with Charley Morgan himself, and had a lovely
chat for quite a while with him. He was totally - other than by hearsay
from owners who'd told him about theirs - uninformed about the boats, having
retired long before they were produced by the company; he's not even sailed
on one. However, he did give me several leads, which, by due diligence, I
was able to track down, as well as find others from talking with them. Each
of the ones I spoke with had been with the company at the time these were
built. I was able to talk at great length with Pete Brown, the service
manager for the entire production run as well as Quality Control supervisor
for a period in the beginning; he's now a surveyor, and has surveyed several
in recent times, so was a great help in knowing where to look for the
(*very* few) potential challenges in these older yachts. I also spoke at
length with the parts department manager and a few others who had been
there, so learned a great deal about how these boats were made - which made
me feel marvelously clever for selecting such a stout boat. This surveyor
has surveyed a lot of them, but in particular, recently, two
circumnavigators, one of which went around the hard way, with no canals. He
asked the owner if there had been any special prep, and aside from renewing
the usual stuff which gets old, there had been none, and despite carrying
spares for nearly anything which might go wrong, none were needed. So, I
have no doubt that, barring stupid disregard for normal maintenance, these
will stand up to nearly anything we might encounter.

All this dithering and not-running-out-and-buying-a-boat also produced two
current owners of the Morgan 46 type we're targeting. One of them has
graciously offered to take us sailing (as well as see how they deal with
living aboard, full time, with a cat, too, and then going out sailing at the
drop of a hat). The other of them has owned since new, and has offered to
not only fill our heads with everything there is to know about them, and to
come with us on a couple of the ones we're seeing, but show us how he spent
70k on his most recent refit. Both of these owners are in the same general
area, so we'll have a very full couple of days immersing in M46iana.

have yourselves a merry little xmas!

We did, indeed, most of which was spent getting to the point above.
However...

:{)) We'll do that, despite that her kid(s? at least one, but he - the 21
year old college senior - claims it's all 4 of them) seems to have a bug
up
his rear about our doing this which has resulted, this weekend, in an ad
hominem attack on me and my sanity and a threat, as well, should I
continue
in this course, along with an accusation that I'm stealing his mother's
fortune (I'm buying the boat) - and, not incidentally, his mother :{))

I wrote him a note indicating that it would be appropriate to talk about
what it was/is which is prompting all this. He replied with a laundry list,
but most of it had to do with his nervousness about our ability to do this.
His enumerated concerns were addressed one at a time. The other had to do
with that he wished it wasn't happening quite so soon, for reasons he wasn't
willing to spell out, but I think he's nervous about setting out on his own
when he gets his first job after this, his senior year in college. It's
being better to 'wait 5 years' was as close as he could come to that
admission, so I asked for some specificity about what would (not 'might')
change by waiting for any defined point in time.

I've yet to hear back from him, but at least there's communication :{))

So, we're off to do our final looking. We'll see 4 boats in this mad dash,
sail on another, and then spend a day or two in St. Augustine, our country's
oldest city, to which - other than drive through - neither of us has been
before, and then head home.

We've got our Virgin Islands broker looking into the 3 over there, our NC
broker, who says he can communicate with every owner of every boat made, and
find us one if we don't get what we want the first time around, and our
Annapolis (the one who 'rescued' me from the jerk I started with) broker
looking into that area, so we're confident we'll have our boat if this trip
doesn't do it for us.

The earlier version of this referenced one example of a well-equipped
long-distance cruiser with stuff no longer there and a non-pickled
watermaker; that boat is still very high in contention, as we've also
developed a contact for getting estimates on what it is we'd like done to
it. I have doubts that it could be as much as the differences between it
and the two high-priced spreads in FTL - but then, again, we'll talk at
length with an owner who just spent 70k on his *second* (in 25 years) refit,
so, perhaps it will be that much.

Stay tuned...

L8R

Skip and Lydia, stomachs no longer turning, just jumping :{))

--
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you
didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away
from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.
Discover." - Mark Twain