She's ours
Sea trial, signatures, and the handover of one key. After the better part of a year looking, the search ended on a Sunday afternoon in June.
Draft — Michael to rewrite in his own words.
The survey had been done four days earlier and had come back about as well as a thirty-three-year-old boat can. The surveyor's actual words, when I asked him the only question that mattered, were that he would buy it himself and that nothing about it made him want to run away. That is not the same as saying it is perfect. It is better than that: it means the problems are the ordinary kind.
So on Sunday we did the sea trial, and then we paid, and then somebody handed me a single key and that was that.
She came with two brand-new Lewmar 30 winches still in their boxes, which the previous owner had bought and never got round to fitting, and which will eventually go on the coamings aft where I can reach them from the wheel. The air conditioning, which had been a sticking point, was fixed before handover.
There is a very particular feeling to standing on a boat that has just become yours, which is roughly nine parts delight to one part quiet arithmetic about everything on the survey's defect list. Both feelings are correct.
