Bringing the Dream home...

There are a couple of choices here.  I could have it shipped by road or have it motored home by water using a hired Captain or by myself. The road route is possible but requires major disassembly of the upper part of the boat and I am not there to help or oversee so I discounted that option.  A Captain would require payment for his time and expenses as well as all the expenses involved in running the boat.  So why not bring it home myself?  The time and distance I figured out to be about 30 days and 2000 miles. The vacation I had accrued would cover it and my current job was not as presence critical as it used to be.  So that was the decision.

The route options were few.  Here it is....!

 Click here for the detailed route, turn-by-turn in Google Earth

I laid the route out in detail using OpenCPN, a free charting software package which is absolutely superb and a labour of love for a number of enthusiasts.  All the nautical charts, both electronic and raster (like the paper chart) are all free from the USA's NOAA and are kept up-to-date on a frequent basis.  By comparison, all of the charts for Canada have to be bought from authorised suppliers and they are not cheap.

I also did some analysis on speed and fuel consumption when arriving at the time it would take.  Dream Weaver has two Caterpillar 3216 diesels.  At wide-open throttle they will produce 420HP each, push the boat at 24 knots and consume diesel fuel at a total rate of 44 gallons an hour. 

Cut back to a more leisurely pace and the fuel consumption drops way down as you can see from the graph that I made above. Speed is not plotted on the graph yet because I don't have all the data until we actually measure it en route but, during the brief sea trial, from memory 1200 rpm gave a speed of about 7 knots.  Figure it all out over 2000 miles and you can see there's a huge trade off in cost of fuel versus time taken to complete the journey!  Diesel fuel is about $3.50 a gallon in Fort Myers today.

I will be flying April 5th to finish work, launch and provision the boat.  Jon will join me there on Friday.  We plan to head out early Saturday, at high tide, to begin the journey back.  I expect the end of the first week will see us approaching Charleston, SC and the end of the second, Norfolk, VA.  Martin Conway will take over from Jon at Charleston and Jo will take over from martin in Norfolk.


I will be posting updates of progress or otherwise here for family and friends to follow.


Wish us luck!

Second, find a boat...

We sold Knockando in 1996.  The Dream was always there and we were both committed to it. But as the years went on it looked less and less financially practical especially as recessions large and small needled my confidence in our retirement financial prospects.  I started looking at houses in Nova Scotia instead.  We went there on vacation and loved the area.  I found one or two superb looking prospects on the MLS as well.  Time marched on.

In the summer of 2010, around Canada Day, we went down-town Ottawa for lunch.  The Rideau canal was alive with boaters and tourists.  One  boat was a 38 feet Bayliner that I always liked the lines of and had fancied as our Dream boat.  We chatted with the owners for almost an hour and afterwards I realised that the Dream was alive and was not going to be left behind so easily.  I started researching what was out there and concluded that, just as the recession in the US had hit the residential market, so too had it hit the boating market.  There were some apparently very nice boats out there that were financially accessible after all.  We also realised once more that we are only here for one life and this dream was important to us.

I searched many, many boats on line and had settled on the idea of a decent Taiwanese trawler.  I found a Kha Shing in Punta Gorda that looked ideal so I found more in that area and made some calls to Brokers.  With nine boats to see I headed down south in August 2010.  Jon was able to join me while we sweated our way through those boats in the summer heat.  We found a broker who I liked and actually saw 7 boats.  None were ideal for one reason or another.  The Kha Shing wasn't bad but had a lousy layout that I hadn't noticed from the pictures on Yachtworld.  Others simply required too much work to make them habitable or were just plain dumps.  They were all projects of one form or another but I found I liked the Sea Ray aft cabin type of boat.  

Having made the acquaintance of the broker who now knew what I was looking for I left it with him to look around for me.  But my research beat him to it.  I found others and had him look into them.  I also found a 1986 42 feet Sea Ray in Michigan that Jo and I went to see:

It was a pearl, absolutely lovingly maintained with no expense spared, but it was not likely I could get it for the price I wanted to pay.

In total I made four trips to south-west Florida, one to Michigan and one to Gananoque to find the most suitable boat.  I found a 1996 42 feet Sea Ray Aft Cabin being offered in Englewood, Florida for $129,000.  They all look great in the pictures on Yachtworld and this was no exception!  But this one was the newest I had seen for this price.  I didn't want to pay that price but I had found that the market was so depressed most boats could be had for much less than the asking price.  I asked my broker to go take a look for me.

The broker reported favourably so I bought two tickets to Tampa and Jo and I went to inspect her.  The boat turned out to be pretty good so I made a conditional offer that was accepted and hired a surveyor to go through it.  I flew back again for the survey during which we sea trialled the boat.  Naturally he found many items but none that prevented me from making a revised offer.  The final price was well below original asking which allowed me some insurance against hidden horrors.  She is much younger than I expected to be able to get but she had not been well looked after so there will be some sweat equity and dollars to be sunk into her before she is ready to cruise for retirement.  Since buying the boat I have moved it from the marina her previous owner resided in, hired Caterpillar mechanics to service and give the engines and generators the once over and hired a mechanic to service the heads.  I also went there last weekend and did some repairs and provisioning myself.

So, this is Dream Weaver, the name Jo gave the boat. We took legal ownership on October 22nd 2010. She is now registered in Canada but not imported of course.  She stands as you see her above waiting in Port Charlotte, Florida for the sun to melt Ontario's winter away.  In April 2011 she will be relaunched and we will begin the journey back to Canada.

First, have a dream...

Our first boat happened one afternoon in 1990 while I was drinking Scotch in the back yard at our Richmond home. I saw an advertisement in the Ottawa Citizen for a 25 foot Bayliner.  I wasn't really looking for a boat but it appealed greatly.  It was on Big Rideau lake at a run-down marina in Rideau Ferry.  The boat was OK and it was $30 thousand so we bought it.  We named it Knockando for the name of the single malt I was drinking when I decided to buy a boat. And so it began...

We learned to operate the boat under the watchful eye of Kurt, the German dock-master there, and spent a season enjoying the locks, camaraderie and well, the boating life.

The next year, on our summer vacation, we ventured down the Rideau River to Kingston and the 1000 Islands area.  Although our boat's final drive went kaput and was butchered by a so-called mechanic at Kingston Marine we loved the area and the new found freedom of a massive, beautiful cruising area with no locks.  We decided to leave the junk-yard marina we were in and, with some sadness, Kurt.  

In the spring Jon and I took the boat to Prescott on the St Lawrence River.  We were lured by an impeccable marina and cute dock-hands on loan from college for the summer.  We summered there but found we were an hour's cruise on plane (think: $$$) out of the islands so we moved to a marina more in the thick of the Islands.  We moved our boat to Holiday's Afloat Marina in Ivy Lea.

Then we went to the Toronto boat show.  Big mistake financially but good in the long run.  We bought the second Knockando, a new 1990 30 foot Bayliner we bought in January 1992.  It was spacious and had a single gas-sucking 454 Mercruiser but it was ours and it was new and it was financed.

We cruised a few years down in 1000 Islands and had wonderful weekends and vacations there. But we could not see getting the boat we wanted long term due to the cost of paying the house and boat mortgages and just running that gorgeous sounding 454!  So we sold it resolving to get back into boating at a later date.

And that was The Dream.  Buy a boat and cruise off into retirement following the sun.