No boat, radio

We are at the Elks lodge in south Sarasota, Florida (map). The last time we were here, we were doing the same thing -- looking at nearby boats. This time, our broker was unable to come meet us, and arranged courtesy showings instead. On Monday we looked at a DeFever 52 in downtown Fort Myers, where parking the bus was a bit of a challenge, before coming directly here and getting squared away. The lodge offers two spaces with 30-amp power, but we've had the place to ourselves since arriving.

Yesterday we took the scooters out and rode the ten miles to the Sarasota Yacht Club on the Ringling causeway to look at a Cheoy Lee 55. As long as the scooters were already out, we also rode to dinner last night at a nearby Thai restaurant. I stowed the scooters well after dark, when it was a few degrees cooler.

Neither boat was in acceptable condition for us, especially for their asking prices. The Cheoy Lee was particularly disappointing, inasmuch as it had been apparently well maintained until a couple of years ago, after which all maintenance stopped abruptly and it's just been deteriorating slowly in the sun and weather -- a real shame. The DeFever was in slightly better condition, but still needed a ton of work, probably to include coring repair on the upper deck and possibly elsewhere.

Unfortunately, we have come to the end of our list. There are no more boats to see here in Florida, or, for that matter, anywhere in the southeast. We've added a couple of long-shot possibilities on the west coast (of the country, not Florida) along with two boats on the gulf coast, including the other DeFever 52, but nothing so far that warrants a mad dash cross-country in Odyssey nor even, probably, a round trip flight from Tampa or Orlando.

As disappointing as it is to be out of options for the time being, I think we are still testing the bottom of this market, by which I mean that used boat prices are not yet on their way back up, in spite of some increased sales activity which I attribute to more realistic pricing. So we do not feel any pressure to close a deal sooner rather than later, and we have the luxury of time on our side -- the right boat for us (at the right price) is still out there, and just has not come along yet. In time, either an acceptable, well-priced example of, say, the DeFever 52 will come on the market, or alternatively one of the boats we've had our eyes on will drop in price to a point where we think it fruitful to make an offer. Time will tell.

In the meantime, we are now somewhat at loose ends. We have no specific plans to look at more boats, and no specific destination in mind or commitments on the calendar until October. Nevertheless, we are on call this month and probably September as well for the Red Cross, so we are reluctant to move too far from hurricane alley. We need to regroup, and to that end we will head this afternoon to a location a bit closer to Tampa, so we can have dinner one evening at our club there and connect with friends while we hatch a new plan.

Photo by macieklew, used under a Creative Commons license.