Saturday, May 12, 2012

The Hunt for the Next Boat continues...

[Maryanne] Aside from our time being tourists in NY, we’ve primarily spent any spare time we have boat hunting. It’s been a depressing endeavour to date, with plenty of lost weekends, expensive hotel nights and travel, and to date no boat in sight. We thought we were pretty close with one boat in the BVI, but the survey turned up way too many serious and expensive issues that we were not willing to deal with. We won’t bore you with the details here, but suffice to say it has been a frustrating time to date.

It’s been mostly impossible for me to visit many of the boats, they are far afield and require more than my weekend to visit and inspect, so Kyle has been doing the brunt of the search and reconnaissance, and has taken 1000’s of photographs to share with me the nooks and crannies of any potential boat. Despite the fact that he has had to visit some amazing locations to view the boats, he spends most of his time with his head in a locker, and rarely gets to enjoy the location’s more traditional offers.

More recently we looked at a boat closer to home – just a 6 hour drive away - and rented a car for the weekend TOGETHER to go and view it. We quickly decided that this particular boat would not work for us, and found ourselves with a weekend to spare in the beautiful town of Portsmouth, NH. We’d booked into a hotel for the Saturday night expecting to make a full day of inspecting the boat, so by noon we’d switched again into tourist mode and explored the town. We shared beach walks, explored old WWII fortifications, Portsmouth is a classic New England town complete with English Pubs, plenty of cafes to relax in and all on a beautiful sunny weekend. To our surprise it seems all the locals go for a run in the mornings (whatever their age or size) before taking their dog with them to meet friends at the coffee shop and catch up with the goings on. They also had several chocolatiers to sample from. We had such a wonderful time we really didn’t mind that the boat turned out not to be ‘the one’. These things have a habit of working out eventually, and thankfully we have time on our hands.


A weekend by the sea