Well sort of…

If you have been following the Red Seas adventure, you will know that we have spent the last few years working towards our goal of living on a sailboat with the freedom to travel, help and inspire people. At the start of August we finally cut ties and booked our one way tickets from Scotland to St Vincent and the Grenadines.

To put this in perspective, we had put our home on the market 3 days before the UK went into its first COVID lockdown, sat with no interest for 4 months and then entertained 40+ viewings in a week. The property sold and we moved into parents’ houses until we were able to book flights from London, through Barbados to St Vincent, where we would spend a few days in quarantine before being let out to move onto a boat…the boat that we had found through talking with someone on Facebook who told us they were selling it but that they were stuck in another country and so unable to join us for the purchase process.

FINDING THE BOAT

Having been released from quarantine, we took a taxi to the nearest marina (as that seemed the logical place to find a boat) only to be told it wasn’t there (PANIC!)…. and that it had been moved to a mooring in the lagoon around the corner (SLIGHTLY LESS PANIC). We hurried to a high point on the road to see if we could identify the boat from photos we had seen online and with some relief spotted the boat floating in the middle of the lagoon.

We spoke with the charter company who had been looking after the boat in the owner’s absence and were told that we couldn’t view the boat as the owner had not yet settled his bill. Several emails (and hours) later we were allowed to board the boat and take our first look at her condition. There were many remnants of a Christmas party (it was now August, don’t forget) and plenty of black mouldy linen strewn throughout the cabins but otherwise, she appeared to be in pretty reasonable condition so we started testing the onboard systems and making plans to take her for a sea trial of sorts. I say that because this was not going to be any ordinary sea trial.

FIRST SEA TRIAL

As the nearest boatyard capable of hauling this 47’ catamaran out the water was on a small island off the coast of Grenada (yes, a different country from where we were), the owner had asked if we would transport his boat across the border along with its sister vessel, a much newer Leopard 46 (worth twice the price).

Confused, but willing to do almost anything to pull the price of the boat down in our negotiations, we agreed to the simple task of delivering both boats safely to the marina in Carriacou, Grenada. Or so we thought. After a few days’ delay caused by a mechanic repeatedly coming to try and fix the broken generator, we chose to cut our ties and set sail from St Vincent without it (and thus no mains power, air conditioning or the ability to top up fresh water tanks) with the goal of test sailing the short hop of an hour to Bequia, the closest island to St Vincent.

With the head sail out, we made good time through the 20 knot wind and 2 metre swell coming across our beam and made the decision to turn south and aim for the last island in the Grenadines island chain, Union. We arrived at Frigate Bay in Union around sunset and quickly dropped the anchor (for the first time) which, naturally, dragged 3 times before we gave up and found the nearest mooring ball to secure to for the night.

UNION ISLAND

Union Island is often frequented by kite surfers and clearly displays its more hipster, Rastafarian vibes in the brightly painted wooden cafes and bars that line it’s Main Street. As we had just cut several days from our sailing itinerary, we were going to have to sit out a waiting period here as rumours were going around that we might be able to circumvent the 10 day quarantine that was currently in place in Grenada, but only if we entered after 1st September.

We patiently sat for a week or so, surrounded by sea turtles in turquoise waters watching the news from the officials in Grenada. After 2 of the most painful PCR tests we had ever had, we were told that the borders were opening up and we could arrange to sail to Carriacou without the fear of a protracted quarantine process.

PASSPORT CONTROL

We quickly headed to the airport to ‘check out’ of St Vincent and the Grenadines. This is a process whereby you go through customs and immigration to inform them you are leaving the country, pay any fees and then process your boat (or boats in our case) through to say they are also leaving the country. This is a system that many of us have seen when traveling on holiday and so we were confident that we, the 2 humans in this saga, could get through it but we had never taken 2 boats across a border like this. Uncertain of the steps we had to take, we rifled through the paperwork we found on both boats and took a small bundle of relevant papers to try and prove the legitimacy of our mission.

For the boat we were looking to buy, we had everything we needed: boat registration, receipts and evidence of the boat arriving into St Vincent earlier that year. For the Leopard 46, however, we had nothing but a few receipts for spare parts. After the officials had finished laughing at the 2 noobs they had standing in their office, they explained to us that we needed to have the registration and entry papers for the boat to be able to move it from one country to the other – papers we knew were not on either of the boats we had access to.

WILD GOOSE CHASE

Another panicked call with the boat owner resulted in one of the more unusual requests I have ever received over the phone. While I don’t recall it word for word, the general content read…

[OWNER] – ‘Ah, no papers’

[ME] – ‘That’s right, they won’t let us leave without them’

[OWNER] ‘Ok, give me a minute….’

(Awkward pause for longer than a minute)

[OWNER] – ‘OK, I think I know where the papers are’

[ME] – ‘Great, we must have missed them somewhere on the boat, I can hop back out to pick them up, give me 10 minutes’

[OWNER] – ’No need. What happened is that the last skipper on the boat needed the papers to leave on a plane from the island. He took them from the boat, showed them to the officials in the airport and then gave them, in an envelope (strange extra detail) to some guy called Seb. I don’t know him, do you?

[ME] – ‘No, we don’t know anyone here. Where is he and why does he have the papers that give him the right to take your boat anywhere in the world right now?’

(That last bit was in my head)

[OWNER] – ‘OK, well if you take a taxi and just ask them to go to Seb’s house, they should be able to work that out… oh and apparently he has dengue fever at the moment so he can’t meet you anywhere closer.’

So with that, we jumped in a taxi, asked nervously if he could take us to some guy called Seb and he of course knew exactly where to go. 45 minutes later, we had collected the papers, returned to the airport and were being processed to take both boats across the border to Grenada. #IslandLife #Winning #ShouldWeBeConcerned?

ARRIVAL INTO GRENADA

By around 3pm, we had boarded a boat each and were ready to set off to our next port of call, Carriacou. It took almost 3 hours and in that time we discovered both boats had various issues from failed auto helms to VHF radios that appear to only send and not receive any messages. As we arrived into Tyrell Bay, Carriacou, we radio’d in to request directions and eventually worked out that we couldn’t hear their responses. Thankfully I was able to WhatsApp the marina and they brought us in using photos and text messages. It’s a bit of an exaggeration but it felt like flying a plane into an airport and only having google maps to tell you where the runway was. That said, it worked well and we anchored both boats in the quarantine zone on the north side of the bay.

The marina manager quickly appeared in a dingy brandishing two fully authorised medical certificates (…so we didn’t need those painful PCR tests?). She told us that we were clear to ‘check in’ with customs and immigration first thing in the morning as they had already closed for the night but then we were free to go wherever we wanted until our scheduled haul out date.

SURVEYING THE BOAT

A few days later we had surveyors come onboard and take everything to pieces, mostly reassemble them and also went for a short sail around the bay to see all the sails up and working. Before long we were lining up the boat with the marina slip to get lifted out and placed on the hard until the survey results were delivered.

Days came and went so we decided to make a head start on sanding back the old anti-foul paint (we were confident the purchase would go through anyway) and started repairing some of the smaller items we had noted during the survey. After 10 days, we finally received the 12 page report listing 25 safety concerns and 16 maintenance issues that were considered to be significant enough to renegotiate the sale price of the boat. Once our heart rates had returned to normal, we costed all the items required to get the boat up to scratch and composed an email outlining our willingness to do all the labour if the owner was happy to cover the cost of parts. Happy we had made a good compromise, we went to bed.

NEGOTIATIONS

The next day we received a call from the owner listing all the things he wouldn’t consider important that had appeared on the survey. The funniest moment of opposition being when he insisted that buying a sailboat doesn’t really include the engines as these are back ups and also not needed from a safety standpoint because you always have wind. While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, the fact that another concern was the damaged main sail was being blatantly overlooked.

So a little upset, we went back to the drawing board and worked out a plan to split the cost of repairs 50/50. That way he could save face but we could probably get the majority of the works completed more cheaply during our travels. We sent this suggestion to him and waited for a response. In the meantime we searched all over the web to see if there were any other boats that met our budget and expectations. That way, should negotiations go south, we had alternatives and could make decisions in confidence.

FINAL DECISION

Would you know it, he didn’t want to split the costs and minutes later we find ourselves, not only closing out negotiations without a deal, but also chasing him for our deposit back while coming to terms with our new homeless status.

So if you ever plan to buy a boat from someone who turned up on Facebook, wasn’t able to meet you in person and asked you to travel through multiple countries over the period of a month to complete the sale, you may want to ask yourself, ‘is this the boat for me?’