We found a nice one. Now what?

We found a sailboat in a marina about 75 minutes drive from our house. Even though the price was quite a lot more than I wanted to spend, I thought it would be a good exercise to see how the other half live, so to speak. Also, it looked really good online. I was curious if it would it look as good in real life.

We arranged with the owner to go down on the weekend and have a look. As luck would have it, he was planning to show it to someone else, so we timed our arrival to coincide with their departure.

All went well.

We found the marina, we found the boat, and we went aboard. I say that as if it were easy, but there was a little trouble on my side. Stepping up from the pier with too tight jeans and stiff knees made boarding difficult, and the seller, a kindly gentleman named Øyvind, quickly hung a strange looking donut shaped fender over the side.

"It's a step," he explained.

I am not too proud to accept help, even if the help in question comes in the form of a rubber ring which looks like it might serve double duty as a hemorrhoids cushion.

So, tentatively, I stepped aboard, then helped my wife haul our four year old daughter over the lifelines. The side decks were a little narrow, but I was used to that. I had previously had a 30 foot sailboat, and one learns how to walk on narrow surfaces.

We made our way to the cockpit, and I was impressed. Very neat, very clean. Very roomy.

Actual hemorrhoid cushion

The seller told us lots of stuff about the boat, but I did not take much of it in, since a) I was playing out my sailing fantasy in my mind, and was too busy with images of sunsets and splashing spray, and b) he was speaking fast Norwegian, which would have demanded too much of my CPU processing power to translate on the fly.

I hoped that Anna was paying more attention, since I was now behind the wheel, surveying the distant horizon with a noble look on my face. (Or at least, that is how I imagined I looked.)

After some prodding, they got me away from the wheel and the binnacle and we went below. The interior was much like any sailboat, with the typical galley, and chart table and saloon table, etc. It looked good, and there was very little evidence of actual use. I liked it, but I was sure we could not afford it, since it was way outside our price range.

And it was then that the miracle happened. All my birthdays and Christmases came at once. Anna fell in love with the boat and wanted to buy it.