We’re Alan and MaryAnn. And, yes, we are the Nauti Nerds! Since we are both retired engineers, the boat name was a natural. MaryAnn was a Software Manager and I was a Project Engineer. We both enjoy travel immensely and loved the idea of cruising the Loop.

Our boating adventure actually started 10+ years ago. We signed up for combination Handling and Cruising (P-101 and P-102) through Southwest Florida Yachts. After spending a week aboard, we were hooked!
A couple years passed and we signed up for Offshore Powerboat Cruising (P-103) through SFY again. Here is where we first heard of The Great Loop. And here is where we started toying with the idea of actually buying a boat of our own to cruise The Loop.
Over more than a few happy hours we discussed and dentified what we considered a Need, a Want and a NiceToHave. Of course it was time for a table/graph in Excel! We ARE nerds!

Time to go window shopping!!

Technically, our boat buying saga (and, yes, it was a saga) began in late 2019. Armed with the table of Needs/Wants/NiceToHaves, we surfed Yachtworld and BoatTrader and attempted to identify candidate boats. We routinely watched websites and would share links back and forth. When we found a boat we both liked we would send the link to our broker (Curtis Stokes – who is the best of the best and has the patience of a saint). He would contact the selling broker. Sadly, COVID was taking hold and the economy, market and entire US culture was upended at this point. What that meant to the boating market was similar to what was being observed in the housing market – high demand and short supply! What we found was that many of our candidate boats were sold or under contract as a result. Conversely, most boats still on the market were available for a variety of (negative) reasons.

Time for another series of happy hours.

We expanded our search criteria while still preserving our identified Needs. A curious thing started to happen after expanding our search. I started sending links to MaryAnn for 50’ boats and she started
sending me links for 40’ boats.

Time for another happy hour.

Fortunately, she was correct in looking for smaller boats. They are cheaper to operate, store and insure.

However, boats were still being sold at a record pace and price. Boat after boat was sold almost as quickly as we could identify it. And others that we did identify and visit had issues that we did not want to embrace. All in all, we visited 6 boats and placed contingent bids on 3. A couple of boats were literally sold in the time span between when we visited it and put a bid together on it. The 3 that we placed bids on did not pass their survey to our satisfaction. Crazy times. Depressing times. Expensive times. Surveys aren’t cheap; but they are worth every penny especially when you consider the cost of boat repairs these days.

Whew.

Oh yeah, I was overseas on business for most of this. I did a lot by email dealing with time zone complications. But we were not going to miss this opportunity. She wasn’t perfect and needed a little maintenance; but she met our Needs/Wants/NicetoHave list.