Days of “BOAT”s

So, we’ll start with a quiz.  Look at this photo and see if you can figure out why we decided to rent a slip in THIS marina (other than the fact it is beautiful) for the first month of our new boat ownership.  Particularly considering that the price is a bit higher than some nearby marinas, and there are none of the common marinas amenities such as bathrooms, showers, laundry, and pools, and you really need a car to get to grocery stores and other places.  The answer is at the end of this blog post.

For the last two days we’ve been busy hauling things to the boat from the truck that we brought from home and hauling things from the boat that we don’t want or have replaced (e.g.  the bed mattress, microwave and digital TV antenna), and then trying to figure out where it all fits.

Today we drove south to Stuart (where we closed our purchase of “Next to Me” last Thursday) to attend a boat show.  Although we just bought a boat and brought most of the things we need to provision it from home, we still need a few items including a dinghy and motor. We hoped there might be some “boat show specials”, but alas there were none.  On the way home we stopped at our local West Marine store, and when we told the salesperson what we were looking for, he offered up a dinghy and motor package with a 10% discount. So we ordered one to be delivered later this week.

So we’ve spent the last two days proving the truth of the saying that “BOAT” is an acronym for “bring on another thousand”.  We knew we were facing this reality when we bought a 25-year old boat, so this hasn’t come as a surprise.  We keep reminding ourselves of all the mileage points we’re getting on our credit cards.  And besides, this boat cost only 56% of what we were willing to spend at the beginning of our search, so we’re still waaaay “under budget” from that perspective.

At the end of another day of “BOAT”ing, we needed to relax on the sundeck with una cerveza.  All is well.

And the answer to the quiz at the beginning is:  the fairways (space between and behind each individual boat slip) is huge!  That’s a major reason we’re in this marina;  there is lots of space, and the surrounding buildings block some of the wind.  This gives people like us, new to large, twin-engine boats, plenty of room to maneuver in a very forgiving manner; a perfect place to learn to to operate the boat safely. And besides, we were told the people at this marina are “the right kind of people”, and while we’re not 100% sure what that means, we certainly like all the people we’ve met who work here or have boats here.