"Gogarty" wrote in message
...
Congratulations on your gift. It is the gift that will keep on taking.

This probably is not very helpful. But your budget of $15,000 will get you
nowhere.

Get a survey. Ignore Wilbur. If you want to insure the boat you will have
to
get one anyway.

Then resign yourself to the fact that you will have $30,000 in that boat
within the year. Heed the voice of experience with a surveyed 1976 Dawson
26.
And that was twenty-five years ago. You could read all about it in an
article
entitled "We'll never fall in love again" in a magazine called "Messing
About
in Boats," long defunct.


No, don't get a survey. Ignore bad advice from the likes of Gogarty. You
have the boat already.
The first thing you should do is sail it. That is the only way you'll be
able to find out what things need fixing and what things don't, what things
you'd like to upgrade and what things don't need upgrading and suit you just
fine the way they are.

The likes of Gogarty represent the "tinkerers" whose pleasure in life comes
from constantly working on and tinkering with things based upon the
theoretical and not the practical. These are the folks you see at a dock or
in a vacant lot spending thousands of hours working on a boat that looks
real purdy but never has been in the water since they acquired it. Chances
are it never will be anything more than a project boat.

Real sailors are practical people who have as their first priority sailing
and they upgrade and change and repair on the basis of real need and not
perceived need. Real sailors only spend their valuable time working on
things that NEED to be worked on and they find this out by sailing, not by
theorizing or paying for advice from some fool who has never sailed the boat
and never will.

Surveyors are big piles of steaming dung, IMO. They arrogantly set foot
aboard a boat propped up in a yard and they pretend to know how it will sail
and what it needs to make it sail better. The only worse idiot is somebody
who pays a surveyor good money to theorize about what needs changing.
Imagine paying somebody to evaluate your home theater stereo system without
ever having turned it on and listened to it?

Sail the boat. Learn what needs to be changed. Change it. It's that simple.
This doesn't apply to every boat, just small, simple sailboats like your
Sabre 28. You can handle it yourself. Save your money and spend it on things
that matter. Take responsibility for your own. That is the true nature and
calling of any human being.

Wilbur Hubbard