Bill has had his Brewer 44, a classic cruising sailboat, on the market for several months now. Veteran cruisers who know boats love the Brewer 44. Designed by the renowned Ted Brewer, the 44 has a spacious cockpit, a comfortable aft cabin, big engine room and a well designed saloon. The keel is fairly shallow and thick, which makes it great for poking around in places like the Keys, where the water gets a little skinny at times. That keel isn’t so great for going to weather, but gentlemen aren’t supposed to do that. Leave the bashing around for the racers.

Bill’s boat is listed with David Walters Yachts of Fort Lauderdale, one of the top cruising sailboat brokerages. So far there have been two serious inquiries. By serious I mean people drove the three hours from Fort Lauderdale to Vero Beach (perhaps after flying to Fort Lauderdale from who knows where?) to see the boat. The last interested looker—seen early last fall—seemed enthusiastic, but didn’t want to commit to buying anything in Florida until after the hurricane season. Hasn’t been heard from since.

So now Bill is en route to Fort Lauderdale on the boat. The broker persuaded Bill that he’ll have a much better shot of finding a buyer if the boat is amidst lots of other boats for sale and Fort Lauderdale is chock-a-block with boats for sale. The theory is that not-so-knowledgeable boat buyers who don’t know the Brewer 44 will become enthusiastic about it once they see it, but they aren’t going to be willing to drive three hours one way to see it. In Fort Lauderdale Bill’s boat will be one of 10 or 12 that the broker can show a buyer in a single day. The downside is that Bill has to rent a dock for $400 a month to park his boat.  He’s giving the broker 30 days to get an offer, then he intends to take it off the market and go cruising for a few months. If it sells, he’ll immediately start looking for a replacement, a bigger boat with more up-to-date gear that will make it easier to handle the sails and provide more living space below.

My own boat is very tentatively for sale. We’ve had Galaxie, a 46-foot custom aluminum ketch, since 1992 and have sailed thousands of miles up and down the east coast and to the Bahamas in that time. But we’re not using her enough these days to make the maintenance worthwhile. Built in 1980, she’s due for a paint job, but it isn’t likely I would ever recover the cost of painting her. I haven’t listed her with a broker, but I have notified McCurdy & Rhodes, the firm that designed Galaxie, that I will entertain offers. Supposedly the firm has someone up North who is interested, but that someone hasn’t yet scheduled a trip to Vero Beach. If she sells, fine. If she doesn’t, that’s fine, too. If I can ever dig out from under all the work I’m doing and find the time to go cruising, Galaxie is the boat to do it. I have no interest in another sailboat since none will be her equal. I might think about a powerboat, but given what’s happening to gasoline prices I’ll have to think long and hard about just what kind of powerboat. 

Before we bought Galaxie we chartered sailboats often in the Caribbean. It’s awfully easy to step aboard, sail around for a week or two, then turn the boat back in to let the charter company take care of all the maintenance. But there’s a downside: charter boats are never equipped the way I would equip a boat.