Wait What??? You're Getting Another Boat?

(Note:  The three photos above are CAD drawings from the Catalina website)

Both of my readers by now have guessed that we were really impressed with Shardana, the Catalina 425 that we sailed on during our recent charter out of the Chesapeake Bay.  They have also realized that our subsequent boat shopping, then me spending the weekend cleaning out Seas The Day were foreboding a bigger announcement which we can now make.

Seas The Day is growing up.

She will morph from a Catalina 315 to a Catalina 425.  We'll keep the name, but change boats.

It looks like the offer was accepted, a down payment offered, a mortgage applied for, more down payment requested (I screwed up paying some of Vicky's CC bills a while back), more down payment found and provided and we now expect that if...

if...

if paperwork can get emailed to China, signed and FedEx'd back in time, etc.

and if all else goes well,

then the boat will be ours towards the end of next week.

But that only means the dealer's yard can start putting her together.  The 425 is much farther along than Seas The Day was when we first saw her - it's already in the water and parts of the mast were in place when we went boat shopping the other weekend.

With luck, it will quickly get assembled, I'll get oriented to her, we'll do a day or two of sailing out of the Delaware, punch out items will get completed, and it will get moved to Rock Hall, MD (to allow us a couple of months of use before the end of the season) before Vicky returns around the end of September.

It's going to be a wild few weeks.

That leaves the question... why?

Obviously, that's a bit complicated.  Vicky usually shops a lot for a purchase.  I ALWAYS research a purchase like this extensively.  Yet here we are a few weeks after first seeing a 425, purchasing one.

Allow me to explain.

First, It's a Catalina.  I'm not a sailor... never grew up near the water... basically decided to start sailing because of the condo we had at the time.  But we looked at a wide range of boats and settled on the Catalina 315 five years ago.  Sailing Andy's 425 felt like a simple iteration (much larger) that didn't require a lot of relearning boat systems.  Even during the boat buying tour inside, I could predict where things were and what they did.  It's enough of a bump to remove some of the very few limitations we felt with Seas The Day, yet seemed like it could be a nice boat for a couple for quite some time.  We know a few couples who have 50-footers, but they seem like way too much boat for our foreseeable needs.

Second... It's a Catalina.  For that I have to explain about "Jerry".  I encountered Jerry when our fuel tank leaked as we were getting Seas The Day ready for this year.  I called Catalina to try and figure out what to do and ended up talking to this guy named Jerry who I had never heard of.  But it turned out he said he designed the 315... seemed to be relatively high on the totem pole there... knew a lot about her and seemed genuinely worried that the tank failed so early (yet clearly years beyond the warranty).  Here's what impressed me -- Jerry immediately offered to send me a new tank at cost (and did so in a way that got us up and running quickly).  That willingness to stand behind a product seems rare today (I know the effort it takes) and it made a great impression on me.

It turns out that Jerry seems to have also designed the 425.  Evidently, he's also a VP there and their lead designer.  Here he is introducing the 425 design a few years ago.

Third is our Catalina dealer -  G. Winter's Sailing Center... working with Brian was great (we enjoyed the buying process last time), also anticipating another delivery trip with Capt. Gary and everything that goes along with that experience.

Finally... our two "sailing axioms" and the reason in this so far already...

1.  We have both been incredibly blessed.

(especially in our careers)

and

2.  Heartbeats are our most limited resource.

(We're not getting any younger)

Yes, we could have spent months researching and evaluating.  We would have lost a lot of time in boat visits, we'd be 6 months older, we might have decided on a different boat, but I doublt we'd end up with a better one.

We know the brand... we like the boat...

So "Seas The Day"!