My wife and I live aboard a wonderful 45-foot Morgan ketch, which has lots of room – OK, lots of room for a sailboat – and fits our long-term needs perfectly. However, until we can sail away for tropical shores, we still need to work, and that means keeping the boat on the James River in Richmond, Virginia.
We tell people that we are as far up the James as you can get and still get back to the ocean. Unfortunately, trying to sail a 45-foot ketch this far upriver is like asking an elephant to drive a Volkswagen. The engine gets much more use than the sails.
FRANK MUMMERTThe author and his wife enjoy an afternoon sail on Gentoo, the Catalina 22 they bought on Craigslist.
We were able to live with this arrangement for the first two years, but recently the urge to sail became almost overpowering. When we did get out, we were beginning to see some degradation in our sailing skills and knew that we needed to do something, quickly.
We thought about chartering a boat – even priced it out a couple of times – but the reality is that we want sailing to be something we can come home and unwind with, not a weeklong vacation. We looked into joining a racing team, but the nearest teams were an hour away, and, frankly, we prefer a more leisurely pace. Although Suzanne is a bit of a speed freak, she likes to be on the helm when the boat is going fast and doesn't feel as comfortable just hanging on. As for me, anytime the boat moves too much to keep the drink in the glass, I tend to reef.
I started looking for a new boat – something small that we could play around on – without mentioning it to Suzanne. I realize it was wrong, but sometimes a husband has to keep secrets from his wife – especially when his two-page to-do list isn't getting any shorter. It started out simply enough. It was late at night, I was working on a writing project and Suzanne had gone to bed hours before. I figured it wouldn't hurt just to look at a few pictures.
Before I knew it, it was after midnight, and I was no further along in my writing assignment. I had, however, looked at over 200 boats without ever leaving my seat. I had looked at boats as far away as San Juan, Puerto Rico. I had also come to the conclusion that it would be possible to find a boat in my price range but that I couldn't do it in Puerto Rico. I would need to restrict myself to Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland.
That's when I realized that using the Internet was a dual-edged sword. I could shop for boats all over the world, but whenever I tried to restrict my search to a specific area, things became trickier.
LOOKING FOR LISTINGS
I tried using the standard boating sites and the auction sites like eBay, but in most cases, I found either that there were no listings or that the listings weren't restricted to my locations. Eventually, I decided to restrict my searches to my three local Craigslist sites.
Craigslist (www.craigslist.com) started as local trading site in San Francisco in 1995. Craig Newmark created it as a way to communicate local information to people in the software and Internet industries; it has grown into a for-profit company, covering 500 regions in 50 countries. It is possible to find just about anything on Craigslist, from a book to a job. In Virginia, the three areas I decided to keep an eye on were Richmond, the Eastern Shore and Hampton Roads.
FRANK MUMMERTSome boats listed were more fixer than upper.
As I started to watch the lists, I also was able to better define the boat I was looking for. I wanted something small, between 20 and 25 feet. It needed to have an outboard motor and a trailer. Since I have my American Sailing Association teaching credentials, it would be nice to have a boat that I could use for teaching, which ruled out catboats and pointed me toward big cockpits and small cabins. I knew that for what I wanted to spend, I was looking at something built between 1975 and 1985.
When I finally mentioned to Suzanne what I was doing (she took my nocturnal Web surfing rather well, I thought), she surprised me by adding one thing to my list: The boat had to be in pretty good shape. I had not considered this to be a major issue, but on reflection, if we were going to have a second boat, it needed to be usable. Other than that, her response was, "Buy me a boat, baby!"
GETTING SERIOUS
The hunt began in earnest (and not just late at night). I set up the three local sites on my home and work computers and started checking them on a regular basis. At first, that meant once in the morning when I got to work and a second time when I got home.
Within a week, my definition of a regular basis had changed. I had found a Catalina 25 on the Richmond list and sent an e-mail to the owner. By the time he got back to me the next day, the boat was gone; I was the fifth person he had had to turn down. From then on, I checked all three lists first thing in the morning, midmorning, just before lunch, just after lunch, just before leaving work, when I got home and just before bed. If possible, I got in an extra peek or two in the evening. I sweated out the weekends when I had to be away from the laptop.
One of the things I discovered is that if the seller didn't post a picture, there was generally a good reason. Occasionally, that reason was that the seller didn't have a digital camera or know how to post a picture. But more often, it was that if a picture had been posted, no one would have called. Selling on Craigslist is a lot like Internet dating when it comes to that.
I went to look at only one boat whose owner didn't provide a picture. The owner had described the boat in such rosy terms that I figured even if I took off half for exaggeration and puffery, how bad could it be? The boat wasn't bad, but the trailer was. The owner had described it as having a "little surface rust." I think a better description might have been that there was a little surface under the rust.
