"Wilbur Hubbard" wrote in message
anews.com...

"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



A sensible approach. Can't nobody argue with that. Well said, Mr Hubbard.

++ Shad O'Shay ++