We Welcome With Love, S/V Bosco
March ’15 at 3:35 pm
11,000 lb. 3 oz., 408 inches
Proud Parents Jake & Jill

We have been blessed with a baby girl on a snowy Thursday afternoon in March in Annapolis, Maryland. Our baby is a 1987 Island Packet 31. She is a beautiful, bright and cheery addition to our lives.

I know it may sound funny to name a boat, and refer to an inanimate object as if its a living being with a soul. But sailing comes with a long line of tradition and superstition stemming back to early civilization. Ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians would name their ships after gods in the belief that the honored god would protect the vessel at sea; though they weren’t always named after women. The tradition of giving a boat a feminine name and referring to a boat as “she” stems from two theories: one rooted in language and the other rooted in symbolism. In most European languages, objects have gender, and typically boats take female gender pronouns, regardless of the name itself. Historically, sailors saw a ship’s figurehead as the embodiment of the spirit of the ship. And although sailors considered an actual woman aboard a ship to be unlucky, they believed the female figurehead was a comforting presence with the power to calm the sea.

In an effort to embrace these traditions, our boat will be referred to as she, even though she is dedicated to our beloved boy, Bosco, who passed away a few years ago. His soul will travel with us wherever we go and will live on in the spirit of our boat.

How We Came To Meet Our Girl

If you read our last post, boat selection, you can follow us along our path to the decision on the exact type of boat that we wanted. All we had to do was go find her – easy enough right?

We booked a 3-day jaunt to Maryland (in March) to hopefully find and purchase our new home “on the sea”. We reached out to our friends, Dave & Penny who linked us up with an amazing boat broker. In early February we sent a wish-list of sorts of the boats that we liked in and around the area as he compiled his own list of boats that he felt would be worthwhile. In total we had 5 IP-31’s that made the list.

As we boarded the plane, Jake said to me, “hopefully we make the worst financial decision of our lives before we head back.” I thought the same thing!

It was a bit of a rocky start to our trip as we landed in some pretty fierce New England winter weather that was unbecoming of the northeast. We decided to rent a car because we assumed we’d be driving all around Maryland looking at boats. The drive to our hotel took an extra 2 hours because of horrible weather and horrible traffic. And while we were feeling a lot of stress (and exhaustion) we were thrilled to arrive at our less-than-stellar digs. Normally when we travel we do it in a style that embraces local culture and usually stay in fun or interesting B&B. But this trip’s agenda was to spend as little money as possible 😉 .

The next day we planned to meet up with our boat broker, who offered to drive us around to look at boats (a notion we were both really happy about because it was a bit of a nightmare navigating through the nutty highway systems in crummy weather). So we had a bit of a lie-in and slow start as jet lag set in full force. We reconned a light breakfast and some snacks at a local Whole Foods before meeting with Bob (the broker) in our hotel lobby.

Before we head out on our journey, Bob gave us a brief on the boats we were interested in, and his take on their situation. Since he’s local and in the biz, he could get insider information that made our plan of the day an easy one to tackle, because we quickly crossed off 3 of the boats on our list due to mega issues that were found (either the boat itself or the sellers’ issues). In the end, there were 3 boats we were hoping to see.

We sat in the car for about an hour and a half as Bob drove us through a very foggy and rainy tree-lined countryside until we finally got to the sleepy town and a quaint marina. Both Jake and I were feeling a lot of anxiety and excitement. This is it. We are actually looking at our first boat to potentially buy…

When the car pulled up to the marina, it was really foggy and the rain started pouring down. We got out and it was frigid at 38 degrees. Many say that boat ownership is akin to standing in a cold shower ripping up $100 bills. This thought crossed both of our minds as we made our way to the only sailboat sitting in her slip in the practically empty marina.

Despite the rain and fog and general gloominess of the day, this boat stood out immediately with her bright blue canvas accenting her bright ivory body. She was gorgeous and so cheery looking sitting there, bobbing in the icy water. For us, it was love at first sight. I’m not sure if it was this boat or just the fact that we were finally here about to step on the first boat (and hopefully the first step of our new life).

We carefully made our way across the icy wet dock and immediately started ripping her apart. Armed with notebooks, cameras and headlamps we crawled in every crevice we could documenting our thoughts, taking measurements and getting a general sense of the boat inside and out. We opened every single locker, scrutinizing each thing we could with as much detail as we could muster (mostly due to cold) before moving on to another. After tedious note taking and photography, we put everything back together. Before departing the boat, we decided to pull down the dining room table in the galley and envision ourselves living in this space. We needed to make sure the boat was in good condition but more importantly needed to make sure she felt right. And with that we were sold.

We told our broker that this was the one we wanted and we were ready to make an offer, but since we already made the drive we might as well go have a look at the other IP 31 that was only 10 minutes away.

It took us a little longer to get to this marina due to the tiny back roads and tricky entrance, but we pulled into the dry dock area and decided to hoof it the rest of the way to view our second boat, dubbed “Amazing Grace”. It was wet, icy and cold, but that didn’t stop us from scouring the boat yard in the mud and rain for our second boat. We finally spotted her after 15 minutes of searching, climbed an icy ladder and dove in to boat #2.

This boat was in EVEN BETTER condition than the last, with lots of fancy upgrades (some of which we really didn’t want or want to pay for). But it also had an offer already and was priced much higher than the first boat, and while it was beautiful, we just didn’t want to pay for the extras that we didn’t want in the first place. So even though it was probably a better boat, it wasn’t our boat and we could feel it.

Even though we were already sold on our boat, we decided to check out the 3rd IP 31 on the list as it was at the office we were headed to anyways. It would also give us some piece of mind to see another boat because 3 is better than 2…right? At least for comparison! So after another hour + drive we finally pulled into the Annapolis boat office and marina and crawled up another icy ladder into the shrink-wrapped boat to find a very poorly cared for rendition of the other boats we just saw. There were spider-webbing cracks on all the surfaces, mold everywhere, weird smells; a clearly untouched vessel of 2+ years who’s seller refused to lower the already overpriced listing. Needless to say we didn’t spend much time diving through this boat because we already met our Bosco, two boats ago. We had found what we hoped will be our new home and passport to [hopefully] world adventures. That afternoon we put together an offer.

Later that night we had dinner plans with Dave & Penny, and couldn’t wait to tell them the news. They were so excited to hear about “their kids” growing up and leaving the next on their own boat. We met them at their gorgeous Kent Island home and they chauffeured us to their brand new Beneteau 41 boat (which was immaculate and probably better than a 5-star hotel). It was immaculate. After the tour we headed over to a little crab house and gorged on tasty fish, lobster, hushpuppies and beer!

When we got back to our hotel around 11pm, we were completely exhausted but still whirring with the excitement of the day. Any day now we could be boat owners.

The next day we were planning to check out a couple of other boats, but since a horrible snow storm came in we decided to hunker down in our hotel instead. I mean we did already make an offer and were pretty settled on this boat, so it didn’t make sense to risk our lives just to potentially see another boat that may have some major issues with it (since it was a red-flagged listing via our broker). So instead we hung out in the hotel working and organizing loose ends while waiting to hear news from our broker.

We got the call early in the afternoon that our initial offer was rejected, but negotiations were in motion and within another 2 hours we had an accepted boat offer! Within another hour we had our house ready to list on the market. It’s all happening, and happening FAST.

It was a bit of a whirlwind of emotions that left me feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. So many big things happening at once is a lot for anyone to handle. Jake only felt excitement and helped me to wrangle in my worries to get me through the day. Although emotions were running high, we are both elated that things are falling in place better than we could have ever hoped.