And the winner is...

I'm a lousy blogger.  I have tremendous respect for people who have the discipline to blog on a regular basis.   And yet in the few sporadic posts I've managed to mention at least three models of sailboats that were "the one".  And now we have bought the boat and it is none of the above.  We were sure that a Catalina 34 was the boat we wanted.  Yes, you're correct I hadn't even mentioned that one yet.  We even had an accepted offer on one in Santa Cruz, CA.  Fortunately that deal fell through, thanks to an honest yacht broker.  There were issues that came to light that were beyond what we wanted to deal with.  We were on the verge of a trip farther south to look at the C34's available.  I had booked hotel reservations and made appointments with brokers.  Then one of our wise sailing mom's, Laura, sent an email with a variety of boats that looked interesting to her, half of which were in Puget Sound.  hmmmmmmmmmm

On a lark, Dave & I did searches of boats available in Puget Sound based on size and price.  We came up with seven boats we had never been on that we would have ruled out over the years for one thing or another.  The hotel reservations and broker appointments were cancelled and we drove north instead.  Two of the boats were already sold.  That left five boats for us to scratch and sniff over a long weekend.  And when I say "scratch & sniff" I'm not really exaggerating.  We walked all around them, inside & out & from the dock.  We pulled up every cushion, explored every locker, sniffed bilges, sat on toilets, crawled in and out of berths

Day One we looked at a Custom Peterson 37, a Valiant 32 and a Gulf 32 pilothouse.  The clear leader for the day was the Valiant.  A stout cruiser that had a lot of expensive upgrades done.  However the Valiants of this vintage have blister problems and this boat was no exception. It's largely a cosmetic problem and we could have lived with them. I had doubts about the V-berth access and Dave wasn't enamored with the V-drive.  Then on Day Two we looked at the O'Day 35 in Anacortes.  This boat is in great condition especially for a 25 year old.  And she has a new Yanmar engine with less than 150 hours of use.  And she just felt right - from the view from the helm to walking her decks.  We still had one more boat to see, a Hunter Cherubini 37 in Blaine.  We kept our minds open, but we were already talking about making an offer on the O'Day.  And sure enough we could have ruled out the Hunter from the dock.  We did our due diligence though and gave it the once over.  As soon as we got out of earshot of the broker we were talking about calling the broker in Anacortes.  When I looked at the listing on my phone I saw the price had dropped $5,000 since we had been on her that morning! It was a sign!!  We called the broker and made arrangements to meet at his office the next day to sign the offer and give him a deposit.

And then everything just dropped into place easily.  We went back to Anacortes a couple of weeks later for the survey and sea trial.  She sailed through both well.  We were able to close within about a day and we are boat owners again.