Changes in Latitudes…

Evenstar has been sold.

Our last view of Evenstar in the early Whangarei morning. Sobbing like a bereft child when I took this…

Maybe some of you noticed it on the About page, but I’ve taken two+ months for me to get my head around it to write about it here. But we finally found a buyer and moved off the boat, and we’ve been back in the U.S. since December.

More about that later.

Oh sure, there was a draft I started on the thirty-nine hour flight back to the U.S. from New Zealand. From memory, it was distinctly maudlin, so I haven’t re-opened it since since I know that maudlin and sad is not the long term takeaway from this chapter of our lives. Parting was indeed a sweet sorrow, and rather emotional after almost sixteen years and countless memories. But it’s a needed change in life.

The decision to sell her was very tough. And the sales process during a global pandemic was grueling. With 99.9% of our potential buyers locked away from seeing her, there was a lot of resistance to buying a boat like this with no guarantee when you could see it or take possession. But selling her was what we needed to do.

Twice Bitten

My last post – almost a year ago – touched on the frustrations of our first broken deal and the aggravation of almost moving off the boat and having to get everything back in order again. It was a heartbreaking and maddening experience.

And we got to do it again, when another buyer put a contract on the boat through our broker. Once again, we were started the process. Organizing and winnowing our stuff, selling off unneeded and unwanted possessions, and moving our stuff off the boat into a storage unit a second time to facilitate a quick closing and turnover.

I decided after this deal fell apart not to discuss it publicly, because I had no interest in having Evenstar get a reputation as a problem boat because a buyer was trying to press advantage on our situation again and disregard the terms of the contract to take more money out of our pockets after we’d made a deal. There was (is) also a lot of anger about how this deal went down, and I didn’t want to air that laundry before the boat was sold. There was nothing wrong with the boat, but in both cases I think the buyers saw an opportunity to pressure us since they knew we were trapped by the pandemic.

This second buyer was meticulous and put us through four (4) separate surveys – a mechanical, electrical, rig, and general survey, and they all covered many redundant parts of the boat multiple times. The general survey was done by one of the best, most reputable surveyors in NZ, and he came back with a very solid report on the boat. The sea trial went off without a hitch, and we had a nice post-survey dinner with the buyer where we chatted about turnover and closing plans and what his plan was for the boat.

Then it became evident this guy knew little about the boat buying process, and he viewed surveys like a slot machine with a guaranteed payout. The more you pull the handle, the more money comes out, right? OK, let’s do another survey…

Just as the deadline for the survey response was coming up, we received a demand for a MASSIVE discount on the boat, with a copied/pasted list of every “defect” found on every survey, without regard to the same items being found on multiple reports. He demanded money for us to upgrade the boat to standards the boat had no requirement to meet, and he essentially expected us to adjust our price to bring the boat to “perfect” condition with almost every upgrade he thought appropriate, which is ludicrous on a twenty-three year old boat.

His demand was so sloppy that he asked for a price adjustment for the steaming light not working at least three different times, because it was reported on three different surveys which he clearly did not read carefully. Five figure demands for electrical work with no documentation to support it, etc. etc.

We went round and round, and the fellow refused to 1) document the reasons for his financial demands or clarify them, 2) consider any of our responses to his demands except to demand more from us, and 3) negotiate in good faith any of the terms of his demands.

By this point – the survey and sea trial – we’d once again moved most of our stuff off the boat, sold more gear, and where prepared to move off within a few days. Finally, the buyer agreed to a settled price in an e-mail in the middle of the night, but then rescinded the agreement a few hours later before our broker was even awake to see it. And he decided to completely walk from the deal even though we’d agreed to meet him roughly in the middle on his ludicrous, unjustified and unmerited demands.

Kathy and I were strongly of the opinion that he’d failed to honor the terms of his contract by refusing to adequately provide his response to the survey in writing by just giving us a sloppy cut & paste with no reasons for the demands, and we should have been able to keep his deposit. But we did not, and this once again cost of a lot time, aggravation, and not a small amount of money.

The worst was that we were back to square one, again, with no buyers and no prospects. Because of this deal we’d lost at least one potential buyer who didn’t want to wait and see if our deal went forward. There’s a lot more spitting and fuming I could do about that whole deal, but it’s not worth the energy. Even writing about it eight months later makes me angry.

Third Time’s the Charm

After several more months in the New Zealand winter, some price reductions, and more attempts to twitch the market and get some action on the boat, a guy who’d been watching her for some time made a move. It wasn’t an offer we wanted to jump on with enthusiasm, but after some back and forth discussions we decided to go ahead with it.

This time, we didn’t do a thing to get ready to move before the survey/sea trial. Because we’d had such a good survey done a few months before by one of the top surveyors in NZ, we were able to shortcut that process. The buyer wasn’t in NZ and couldn’t come to see the boat, but he found a surrogate to sea trial the boat and have a look over her to check the surveys against the real condition.

After two go-rounds and broken deals, we didn’t book a flight or pack a box or move anything off the boat. Finally, we got a green-light that the deal was going “non-refundable” when the buyer accepted the boat and his deposit wouldn’t be returned if he backed out, and then the real scramble began.

We’d realized that given the timing of the deal in late November/early December, we’d be able to spend the holidays with our family for the first time since 2019 if we moved fast. So we booked a flight as soon as we knew it was a “go” and started packing and boxing and selling the last of our unessential personal stuff.

We left the boat for our flight early in the morning on December 9th. We had to get to Auckland for a same-day Covid test at 9:30 in the morning thanks to new U.S. rules, before waiting all day in the airport to get on our 8:30pm flight out of Auckland. Thirty-nine hours later, we landed in Washington.

What’s Next?

After nine years on a boat with no fixed address, the life of a shiftless drifter has much appeal. To be honest, the idea of buying a house or getting a lease felt too much like nailing one foot to the floor than trying to keep on living.

We had two major objectives selling the boat and returning to the U.S.

1. Be closer to family. With our adult children back stateside and our parents all in their eighties, we felt an overpowering need to be near everyone.
2. Downsize and regroup. Evenstar is a wonderful boat, but we bought her for cruising with two teens. In our view, she’s much too large and expensive for a couple of empty-nesters.

Given those main objectives, how to live?

Easy really…keep cruising, but do it on land in an RV. Since our family is spread out all over the country, there really is no better solution but to move around from place to place to see them.

The last two months have been a mad scramble to set up life for land cruising. We’ve moved onto a fifth-wheel trailer and bought a truck to tow it with. We’re making plans to drive cross-country with Danielle when she graduates in May, spend the summer near Will, then come back to the East coast for the holidays with family again.

We spent our first month over the holidays freezing our backsides off at a campground in Virginia – learning how to live on an RV during an unexpected blizzard that knocks out power for a week of below freezing temperatures was an education!

Yes, it’s a rather large truck.

Now we’re in Florida, enjoying the warmth and working out the kinks in our new lifestyle. RV life is quite different from cruising under sail, but there are many, many similarities, too. We plan to give it at least a year to make sure it’s want we want for a while.

It’s an Ending, but it’s not THE Ending

The Wheel of Time has neither endings or beginnings…

The next few years we see as more of a hiatus from cruising than an end to cruising and sailing forever. It’s very, very strange not having a boat for the first time in over twenty years. It’s odd not to hear the lapping of waves or the clicking of shrimp on the hull.

But it’s also good to be there for our families, and we’re enjoying the time together.

Some day – maybe in five years, maybe in ten – we hope to head out again for the horizon. For now, there’s a lot to see on the roads in North America, and more memories to make with our families.

The future of this blog is more in question. I probably will still take pictures and write stories about our travels, but it’s a very, very different thing. And we don’t own the boat anymore.

But I can still point the rig at the equator and drive when it gets too damned cold, so we have that going for us!