Decision Time, Again

As most of you know, we tried to buy two other boats and looked seriously at a long term charter. None of these three worked out, so we're hoping Maia will work out for us. Our haul out and sea trial revealed a number of new things to consider. I won't go into all the details, but as an example the boat is not quite ready for sale since the owner has removed the self steering vane for repairs, a key piece of equipment, so we were unable to test it. We also have no date for when the owner will be done with this or how well it will work. A second issue is what documentation for the boat that we can get in Australia as U.S. citizens. This could be a deal stopper, but we are making the inquiries now. So a number of question marks remain.

This is the time to weigh whether Maia is an acceptable home, sailing ship and investment. An earlier entry mentions a 72 hour decision period, but that starts after we get our survey report, which may take a few days. We have scheduled a haul out date for May 8, so we're on track to keep moving.

Nothing could move forward yesterday, however, since it was ANZAC day, the local equivalent to veterans day. Australians take ANZAC day seriously. Almost everything was closed. So we jumped at the opportunity to go sailing on someone elses boat. The broker tipped us off that a huge sailing race was taking place and we could easily crew on a boat by just showing up at the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron (this is said with a straight face) in the morning.

We put in our names to Judy at the desk set up in the bar of the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron. She lined us up with a boat and warned Craig that if he didn't take his hat off in the bar, it could be his shout (turn to buy drinks for everyone in the bar). We lucked out on the boat assignment, our skipper Trevor and his crew Aaron found us and invited us onto his Farr 11.67 Meter, a fairly large and fast boat. We had a great sail, our skipper is a great sailor and very relaxed about the race. Rather than screeming and stress, we had a gorgeous sail. Trevor was not returning to the port we left, so when the race was over, we sailed on to the town of Cleveland after sunset. We ended up having dinner and drinks with Trevor late into the night last night, great fun. I think we might have worn our captain out with all of the questions we peppered him with. We got the low-down on everything from good places to eat to places to buy boat equipment. Oh - and why Fosters isn't sold anywhere - apparantly no one likes it.


Well, its off to more figuring and research for us now.