The boat is sold! We totally had our money on the apartment selling first, but I guess you never can tell what's going to happen in this world.

We ended up selling to a nice family living in the gulf islands. They had the same initial perception we had, a solid boat that will need a new engine and a bunch of extras, but I think they will learn less is more. They will also be shocked at how that little atomic 4 engine runs.. It sure doesn't look pretty, but it runs like a clock. The nice thing for them will be the work they get to do is all the fun stuff, the add-ons. They don't have to pull out the boat and redo the bottom paint or anything too serious. I wish them many wonderful days of sailing and joy with Avanti.

Boats have a few equations that are fairly true. One being, you buy the boat for X dollars, put X dollars worth of work into them, and you end up selling it for X dollars. This one was pretty true for us. However, the new boater mistake of buy a boat and go buy a whole bunch of tacky stuff at West Marine, for us at least, was limited to a lot of mobile stuff we are taking with us and done on a smaller cheaper boat. Going into our next boat buying scenario we now bring a lot more experience in buying and selling boats, and what to look for in a boat. I totally believe now you need to buy a boat you absolutely love the style of, the character helps you get over the cost and work required.

I think a good way to describe your first boat would be to compare it to your first girlfriend or boyfriend; sure you love them, they're your first and the love is closely related to the novelty of the relationship. At some point you grow up and realize that you just don't fit together well, and they aren't right for your lifestyle, and if you stay together you probably won't achieve the goals you set out to achieve. So, you move on; you miss seeing her(him) go, but you know the naivety you went into the relationship with blinded you from the practical stuff to achieve your truly romantic goals.... Like sailing the world.

We are stoked at this point, all we have left is an apartment to sell, and we can move ahead with our trip. We are getting super close, I don't think we even fully realize it yet. I wrote up a list last night and it is short.

So I thought I'd leave some pics of our first boat for everyone to admire.