Switching seats, changing gears

It’s a little bit surprising to wake up in the morning in the v-berth of a boat you no longer own. This has been the case for my wife and I for a couple of days now that we have finalized the sale of Insegrevious and we still haven’t gotten used to it. In a couple more days, we’ll leave her for the last time, which is something that we find by turns to be melancholy, frightening, and exciting.

This has been home for the last three years, a home that has, of necessity, demanded greater intimacy and labor than most homes, so it makes sense that this should be a significant event of some sort in our lives. But it’s going to happen so fast that it’s hard to put it into any sort of perspective. We’ve been in a whirlwind of paperwork, apartment-browsing, boat-browsing, storage-finding, packing, preparing, and planning, and we’re so exhausted at the end of the day it’s impossible to think about it all rationally. This may be true of any move, but moving out of a house takes time… sorting, packing, hauling, closing, it’s all weeks or even months to work through things. We’ll be done here in about three days.

Last night, when we sat down and thought about it, we figured we can probably get everything we have on board into one small pick-up. People keep offering to help us move, which is lovely of them, but I just have these visions of everyone I know coming over, picking up one item, carrying it to the truck, and then being handed their obligatory slice of pizza and thanked for their assistance.

We are switching our seat from the selling side of the table exclusively to the buying side now and putting the boat search into high gear. A broker we spoke to yesterday pointed out something that we had suspected, that there are sort of a dearth of good cruising yachts in our prospective size range around Puget Sound. Despite this, we have found a couple of decent candidates, and we’re having to force ourselves to slow down a bit and consider all the implications. Three days is no kind of time frame to decide on a vessel you hope to last you a decade or more.

One of my favorite series on Three Sheets, the website, was from the early days, right as the site was starting up, where Deborah and Marty chronicled their search for what would become Three Sheets, their boat. I’m always fascinated by what factors different people consider important when they are looking at boats. It has been enlightening to see all those considerations at play from the seller’s perspective. Now, as we are firmly settled on the buyer’s side of the table, I thought I might continue that excellent Three Sheets tradition and take you all along as we look for our new boat. Stay tuned!