I am going to attempt to start documenting our adventures with our new to us boat that is a Allmand 31 sailboat. Today it still carries the previous owners name “Incentive” but will eventually have its name changed to Escape Plan. I suppose only time will tell how well I do at maintaining this log?
One very snowy day last December I was surfing the internet looking at fancy sailboats we could not afford when low and behold appeared almost the exact boat my wife and I had been wanting & the price just happened to be pretty close to the number we had in our boat fund. Needless to say we made the call & after talking it over put in an offer and eventually got to a price we all could live with.
Now that we had a price agreed to my wife and I were off to actually see the boat and ensure it lived up to the pictures posted on the internet. Only problem was we live in MI & the boat was located in NJ. Luckily my crafty wife was able to find some cheap airline tickets that would let us make a day trip to see the boat vs the 22hrs we might have spent in the car if we drove. We have had a few false starts on similar models in the past.. One was taken off the market before we got an offer on the table, another ended up being way too much of a project, while yet another had a cracked keel that was leaking fuel somehow? Needless to say we were a bit skeptical of what we would find when we arrived in NJ.
NJ had received the better part of 8 inches of snow the night before we arrived, but that did not deter us from shoveling off the boat and sticking our heads into every nook and cranny. In the freezing weather my wife and I spent the better part of the day inspecting the boat and walked away pretty happy with what we saw. This boat was actually in fairly good condition for its age & we could afford it, imagine that? We decided that even though we had been over it pretty good we should still hire a marine surveyor to reassure us that we were not missing anything and to our luck we ran into one during our visit that mentioned he sort of specialized in sailboats. After getting a few good recommendations we hired him & after a few agonizing weeks he came back with a few minor things to fix but overall assured us it was a good boat and it would be safe.
With this we mailed off our check and a few weeks later a title arrived in the mail. I have to admit it was not the most gratifying thing to send off a large check only to receive a piece of paper back saying you now own a boat oh and by the way don't forget to stop by your local DMV & give Uncle Sam his cut of the transaction. Not to mention the pain of not being able to see or touch our new toy as its several states away...
Our next decision was do we have the boat put on a truck and delivered to our local marina in MI or do we bring it back ourselves? After doing some research we guessed that if all went well we should be able to do the trip in just over two weeks. We opted to bring it back ourselves which will mean that we sail a short ways up the intercoastal water way, up the Hudson River, through the Erie Canal, and then across Lake Erie from Buffalo to Detroit.
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