Hi, Bill, and group,

"Bill" wrote in message
...

I have been following your posts because I too have been looking to buy.
My
feeling is that you will never find what you want because you do not
understand that all boats are a compromise, especially when you are
looking
with limited funds, and you don't want to compromise. However, I also
understand the headroom issue. It is the only time when it seems to be
advantageous for me to be short. Maybe you should take up basketball ;-)

Heh. Too short for basketball, too tall for boats. Actually, we're quite
prepared to make lots of compromises. However, compromises which make us
miserable to be in the boat are self-defeating. As to me, if I could be
self-defeeting, I'd be a lot shorter, and we'd already be aboard! :{))

The good news is that we've received several leads to boats we didn't
previously know about, and at least some of them appear as though they'd
work. I'm going to be looking at some of them in the next round of search,
most likely late October or early November.

I have been looking at used boats but usually I get turned off by the
condition of the vessels. I just don't have the time or ambition to be
fixing somebody else's problems.

Interestingly, to us, there have been quite a few *very* nice boats in a
reasonable price range (well, of course, reasonable is entirely in the realm
of the holder's purse) - I just couldn't fit aboard. Natcherly, if one
expects to have a 'perfect' boat, it would have to be new, and we were not
the least misled about that going in. Recall that we did two 4th-tier
charters specifically for the purpose of getting acquainted with poorly
maintained elderly boats... But, back to the top of the para, if you have
the same tastes as we, and a similar budget, I can point you to lots of
suitable boats.

The only thing harder to do than buy a decent boat is to try and sell one.
Notice how long some of them have been on the market.

That's another conundrum. It appears that unless there's a distress
situation (with an accompanying major price adjustment, and, often, a
distinct bargain), an awful lot of boats remain unsold for extended periods
of time. OTOH, there are those which come and go almost immediately.

I do not see prices of used boats going up, but that is just my
unscientific
survey over the last year or so.

It also seems like that after about 5 years, the boats stop depreciating
at
a rapid pace, and the salt hasn't corroded everything yet.

In our case, we'll be very surprised if we find anything newer than 15, and
more likely 20, years old which will fit our budget. We've found that most
of the ones we're able to consider are pretty well packed into the same
price range per type. The bigger and newer they get, the wider that range
seems to be, however.

Another thing, if you buy a boat that is not very well known, you will
have
more trouble selling it - no matter how nice it is. People buy brands that
they know. Has to be the reason why certain brands sell - they are known -
and you know which ones I mean, because they are not very well done.

Indeed - however, it's those in which the upward price movement has been
noted (mostly because we didn't research far enough [we didn't have to, in
order to find out about the type] into better known models - it may well be
the case that had we researched older articles, the better known models
would have had that phenomenon as well) - which gives us comfort.
Realistically, however, we'll either love it, and spend most - if not all -
the rest of our lives on it, or get right off. If the former, we'll have
gotten our money's worth out of it; if the latter, we'll have a brokerage
experience tax to move back ashore...

BTW, have you noticed that almost all of the sail boat makers are now
making power boats? Maybe we need another oil crisis.

That was true in the time of the generation of boats we're looking at, too.
Some of them were motor sailors, but there were others which were motor
yachts (from which the motor sailors' hulls sometimes were pulled).
Different strokes for Different Folks, and all that.

Good luck Captain.

:{)) Thanks. I'm optimistic, and Lydia's stopped gnawing at the second
knuckle and started whining ("go buy that boat, right now, OK??"), so we're
getting there, slowly but surely.

L8R

Skip and Lydia