Searching for the Goldilocks Boat

Could this be our Great Loop boat and home for the next year?

It's time to catch you up on our adventure. 

Our 32 Nordic Tug is still up for sale with Seattle Yachts in Anacortes, WA. Tell your friends! Great, well-taken-care-of boat!(1) 

We shut down our cabin on Decourcy Island in mid-September and have been traveling in our packed-to-the-ceiling Ford F-150 ever since. You may recall, we established residency in Washington state and we've been staying with friends and family. It's not ideal to be living out of duffle bags, but it's been relaxing, frankly, to leisurely see the sites and share meals with family/friends in all of these places(2):

• Edmonds, WA (our official domicile -- thanks Cuz!)
• Chelan, WA (visited a friend in wine country in Central WA)
• Beaverton, OR (lots o’ my family)
• Newport, OR (old buddy on the coast)
• Tiburon, CA (my sister--and caught up on doc & dentist visits(3))
• Orinda, CA (ol’ college buddy)
• Santa Barbara, CA (Mike’s sister)
• San Marcos, CA (Mike’s mom)
• La Mesa, CA (Mike’s cousin)
• Coronado Island, CA (convenient stay at the Naval Amphibious Base(4))
• Orange Beach, AL (flew here to see boat #2-- more on this later)
• Charleston, SC (drove from AL to see boat #3 and stay with Mike’s ol’ college buddy)
• San Marcos, CA (flew back to Mike’s mom’s house)
• Oro Valley, AZ (began drive East to further check out boat #3; my dad's house)
• Las Cruces, NM (saw my Second Cousin)
• Austin, TX (ol’ college buddy)

On the drive from Edmonds, WA to Lake Chelan, WA. Driving along the gorgeous Skyhomish River with its fall foliage.

One of our favorite on-the-road vistas. Mount Shasta, in all its glory, on the Southbound Highway 5 drive from Oregon to the SF Bay Area.

At the pinnacle of our steep, hot hike to The Hippy Tree in Tiburon. Way behind my lovely sister Jeanne and friend Natalie is the SF skyline and Golden Gate Bridge. It will be a while before I return to the Bay Area.

Just to remind some of you, we are on the midst of looking for the best, i.e. Goldilocks, boat for our year-long, Great Loop adventure.

The Great Loop is circumnavigating the Eastern side of the United States. We will be in rivers, lakes, and inter-coastal waterways (ICWs). So please don't picture us on the high seas crashing over swells and hanging on for dear life in a squall. We’re going to be pretty darn comfortable in a stable power boat, in mostly calm waters. There will likely be windy days and rainy days, but we will not be in a hurry. We will wait out sketchy, windy weather. 

So back to the boat shopping...picture our boat needs.

We'll be living on the boat for about 1.5 years. Think: storage. To make it through shallow waters and under low bridges we need less than a 5’ draft(5) and 19’ height. Mike also requires a roomy, clean engine room where he can crawl around with minimal contortions. I require a good-sized fridge/freezer and no carpeting. 

After looking at many brands and sizes we've narrowed it down to 42’ to 48’ power boats.(6)

Nice-to-haves are things like beautifully varnished woodwork inside and minimal teak to care for outside. We want to be proud of our boat and make it pleasant to come back to after a day of sightseeing. 

We’ve kept an eye glued to the online boat sale sites for about 2 months. We were a boat length away from making an offer on boat #1, a 48’ Ocean Alexander, but before we got some key questions answered, someone else snatched the boat from under us. 

We flew to Pensacola, FL to check out boat #2, a 42’ Nordic Tug in Orange Beach, AL, but made a difficult, game-day decision to not buy it because it didn’t seem to be cared for as we would have liked. However, we love all the practical storage and roomy, inside pilot house of Nordic Tugs. 

Walking along the beach in Orange Beach, AL after examining boat #1. We were excited to get our first glimpse of The Great Loop here. We’ll be here this time next year on our boat! We were were charmed by our first taste of Southern hospitality. If you look closely at this pic, you can see rows of sand. It seems that the white sand beach is groomed regularly?

We immediately found boat #3, a 48’ Ocean Alexander Classico, and drove 2 days in a rental car from Pensacola, AL to Charleston, SC to examine it in person. Bingo! It passed our sniff test and the owners accepted our offer. 

We enjoyed the drive from Alabama to South Carolina very much. The roadside flora was green and the plethora of billboards advertising accident lawyers became hilarious. Our stops were Jacksonville, FL and Savannah, GA. 

On our drive from Alabama to Charleston, SC, one of our stops was Savannah, GA. We enjoyed an afternoon strolling through the historic district and seeing the 18th-century squares and buildings such as this one. Most of the plaques in the parks memorialize the revolutionary and Spanish-American wars. (7) Savannah, GA is also on the Great Loop.

After looking at boat #3, we strolled the historic quarter in Charleston, SC. Every single home has a Historic Places plaque. Our favorite plaque said that the original timbers showed damage from Revolutionary War cannon balls. The colorful pastels of the homes and their wrap-around porches were enchanting. 

We enjoyed a BBQ, water-front dinner in Charleston. This is on the Great Loop and is exactly what we anticipate in most stops--water access docks at restaurants. (8)

We want to be in person for boat #3’s inspection, so this triggered a fly back to our stuff waiting for us at Mike’s Mom’s house in San Marcos, CA. Mike engineered a re-pack into the F150 and we firmly set the truck East on Highway 8. This will be our cross-country drive East to start The Great Loop, which will officially start when we take ownership of our boat. 

A cool site in the hot desert between San Diego and Oro Valley, AZ. Here we saw precariously balanced boulders. Closer to San Diego we drove on curvy freeways, skirting giant-sized piles of boulders. 

Funny-looking twin Saguaros on a hike near my Dad’s house in Oro Valley. Are all Saguaros so funny? Did you know that Saguaros of this size are likely hundreds of years old?

 

Typical view on our 9.5-hour drive from Oro Valley, AZ to Austin, TX. The speed limit on this mostly straight freeway was 80 MPH. Really, really fast for us. We observed a plant we never recalled seeing before: a Soap Tree Yucca. 

From Las Cruces, NM to Austin, TX we marveled at the buttes and mesas towering above the desert. We found sites of this leg much more interesting than we anticipated.

Currently, we’re a few miles West of Austin, TX. We learned that this area, known as The Hill Country, is filled with fantastic wineries! I find the wines very drinkable-- many at a lower alcohol (e.g. <13.5%). 

Picture perfect view from a winery in Hill Country (Driftwood). Looks a lot like Napa and our former town, Portola Valley.

We will continue with our drive this week. We are just now trying to decide what East-bound route to take through the South. 

If boat #3 has some sort of time-consuming, costly set of problems, we will take a break from finding the Goldilocks boat until after the holidays and head to somewhere like Costa Rica for a month or so. I’ll let you know how it goes.

FOOTNOTES FOR FUN FACT FANS

(1) Probably the worst time to sell a boat; in between boating seasons in the Northwest. 

(2)  It looks like a really long list, now that I see it in black and white.

(3) We’ve volleyed many questions about healthcare. We have insurance. It uses our domicile location in Edmonds, WA. If we need to see a doctor, either urgently or as an emergency we get covered at the same rate--like we pay only 10% and it’s part of our annual deductible. If we need to see a specialist we will get a referral from our regular doctor in CA. We will pay out-of-area rates, which will be applied to our deductible.

(4) Our buddy is a civilian employee who is able to use the armed forces hotel chain. We stayed at the base where the Navy Seals train. Unfortunately, we didn't see them running with logs on the beach. But we did shop in the Navy Exchange.

(5) Draft is the distance from the waterline to the lowest point of the boat below water. 

(6) We also prefer a single diesel engine boat, to keep fuel and maintenance costs to a minimum but it has been very difficult to find single-engine boats at this size. Most days on the boat will be spent at slow to moderate speeds, so that is another reason for not needing a double-engine boat. 

(7) The squares in the historic district were every two blocks. There’s something to having a common area that a neighborhood shares, isn’t there? Today’s equivalent in neighborhood planning might be a strip mall...but that addresses a larger group of people, I think.

(8) We often wondered why there weren't more dockside restaurants in the SF bay. So many boaters and relatively few fun destinations.

(9) Bonus fun fact: Buying a liveaboard boat is a bit like buying a house. You make an offer, negotiate if needed, and hire a marine surveyor to check it out. An insurance company needs to see the inspection report. And getting insurance is not straightforward. Not all insurance companies offer boat insurance. And if you can get a real agent on the phone, they may know little about boating terms and they are not interested in your business, it seems. The good ones are overwhelmed with requests. The industry seems inundated with claims, perhaps, from hurricane damage.