I took this photo a couple of years ago when we were hanging out on the back of our boat in our boat shed and I loved the reflections. I’m not sure why I never posted it anywhere.
We have been boat owners since 1998. I was in grad school at the time that we bought it….a 32 foot, twin engine, Trojan Express cruiser. Who buys a 30′ power boat while in grad school!?!
Apparently us.
I remember one of the profs in the faculty when she found out about it. “I’ve never known a grad student with a yacht before!”
Not a yacht, truly not a yacht.
A 1975 Pennsylvania lake boat that somehow made its way to BC.
We weren’t looking for a 30 foot boat, we just wanted a boat. We had a decent sum of money to buy something small and reasonably priced after an insurance settlement. We looked at a lot of boats. Everything was too expensive, too run down, too small, or the survey came up as “do not buy!”. And then, one day, at Thunderbird in West Vancouver, we were taking a second look at a 24′ boat that had undergone some significant repairs after we’d turned our noses up at out the first time. We repeated our rejection of it on the second look and, as we walked up the ramp to shore, I looked over at this wonderful boat, with a big back teak deck, and a big lounge seat on the bow, and said “That’s sure a pretty boat”. I sighed because it was so pretty and clearly out of our ballpark. We went inside and flipped through the book of boats for sale and I stopped on a page and said…”Isn’t that the boat at the bottom of the ramp”?
The broker replied in the affirmative and I was focused on the price. It had been reduced, still past our range, but maybe the owner would take a lowball offer?
Turned out that she did not.
We were crushed.
A couple of weeks later the broker called me up and asked if we still wanted the boat.
Well duh…but we didn’t have any additional money.
He said he had called her up when he found out that she’d done a bunch of engine work on a boat that she didn’t want. She loved sailing, her husband had loved power boats. They got a divorce, she took the boat, but didn’t really want it. He pointed out to her that the longer the boat sat there unsold, the more money she was putting into moorage. She said fine, if we still wanted it at the price we’d offered, she’d take it. Given that she’d just sunk about $3000 into it on engine work, we got an even better deal.
And so we became boaters….with far more boat than we initially knew what to do with.
We moored in Horseshoe Bay for years, eventually moving to Burrard Yacht Club. We had some engine gremlins that we chased over the years, we took a boating course and then joined Canadian power and Sail Squadrons, where we helped teach boating courses for over a decade.
In all those years we have never seen another like it. We’ve seen a number of 26 footers, and one or two 36 footers…but never one like ours.
We went through the motions of selling it a number of years ago, then changed our minds and kept it. We did a little more boating after that, but it hasn’t been used much in recent years and we knew it was time to say goodbye to her.
But selling a boat is hard, particularly a bigger boat…that needs permanent moorage…at a time when moorage is scarce.
Over the past year, Kirk could have sold her 20 times over, but no one had any place to put her.
Until now.
Chantelle is sold, and that makes me sad, because a chapter of our life is closing. But it also makes me happy because she is going to a family that is thrilled with her and she is going to get a third life. The buyer is in our yacht club and so we will still see her when we are there.
And, it may be a closing chapter, but it’s the opportunity to start on a newly blank page….. 😊
What comes next…..?
Because we are definitely not done boating!
So now comes the dangerous part…..we start looking at boats again….and not little ones either.