The best laid plans of mice and sailors...

by Mission Ocean on 24 Apr 2017 We knew that buying a boat wasn’t going to be easy; our budget was tight, and our needs specific, even if both of us spend our working days surrounded by boats, and undertaking complicated negotiations. But neither of us were prepared for the emotional rollercoaster that awaited us, and the many disappointments that we would have to overcome in our search.

Our first big deception came just before Christmas. We were a matter of days away from buying a Lagoon 47; all but abandoned by her elderly Parisian owner, she had been sitting on the hard for a good few years when a local catamaran builder, hearing about our project and our backgrounds, thought we might be the right people to breathe some new life into the rather aptly named Southwind, and put us in touch with the yard where she lay. We visited her twice, sourced quotations to repair her delaminated deck, met the owner at the Paris boat show and eventually agreed on a price. Contracts were drawn up, negotiated, reissued…

A week before the survey was due, we agreed to travel to the boat (a 3-hour drive from home) and stay over, to prepare her to be inspected. This job is usually down to the vendor, and when on the hard involves making sure that all spaces are accessible, pulling down deckheads to allow for inspection of the hull and deck from the inside, testing the batteries or making sure that the boat is supplied with shore power to test the electrical installation, and preparing the engines to be started for an oil analysis. The owner being in his late 80s, and living a good 5-hour train journey away, we offered to undertake this simple job ourselves, which he seemed grateful to accept.

We drove down late Friday, and set to work early the next day. My stomach was tight with nerves and excitement throughout the journey, and even more so when we stepped on board. One cabin was full to the rafters with old personal effects, moldy in part, which we carefully lay out in the sun to dry. In this cabin, our suspicions of a damp problem – condensation, or maybe a small ingress? – were confirmed, and the need for an independent survey became more evident. I then set to work isolating the wall lights and unscrewing the bulkhead paneling; Lagoon 47s are designed in such a way as that the only access to inspect the fuel tanks is through the aft cabin bulkheads, as they lie sealed beneath the exterior cockpit seating.

Whilst I was shifting bags, cleaning and unscrewing, Henrique got to work testing the batteries. Flat as a pancake, as we had thought. The ancient old solar panels gave a feeble cough of charge, but nowhere near sufficient to get the batteries going. And on trying to hook up to shore power, Henrique discovered that the boat’s plug had disintegrated in the sun. Our shipyard neighbours – an adorable couple in their 50s who were completely transforming one of Lerouge’s catamarans into the retirement cruiser of their dreams (and doing a very respectable job of it) – took pity on us and bought us a new plug on one of their trips to the local chandlery.

The new plug fitted, Henrique set the batteries charging and worked out why the power kept tripping, before turning to the engines. Predictably perhaps, there was no diesel on board, and so we rigged up a water connection and found a jerry can, which we planned to fill up the next morning. Grimy and tired, but content with a good day’s work, we snapped some shots of the sunset from what we were beginning to think of as our deck, and headed back to the little room we had rented in a house on the beach.

That evening, my stomach got worse and worse. We put it down to nerves, or perhaps the tap water we’d been drinking at the yard all day. Henrique called the owner to give him a rundown of our progress, and explain our intention to return to the boat to start the engines up just long enough to draw an oil sample the next morning. A couple of pastis and a fish dinner later, I felt a bit better and we both collapsed into a deep sleep.

The following day, fueled with excitement, we left a note for our hosts, made a thermos of tea and threw our bags into the car at the crack of dawn. As we were passing tools up the ladder, my phone beeped – an SMS from the vendor. Whilst we had slept like babies, he had obviously spent the night working himself up, and had decided to forbid us access to the boat that day. We tried to call, and eventually got through after a frustratingly long wait, to be told that if we started the engines without a “marine professional” present, the deal was off.

Henrique is a highly qualified chief engineer on large yachts, and has been for 12 years, something of which the owner was aware but had either conveniently forgotten, or had decided was simply not sufficient. No amount of discussion could persuade him to change his mind, and he made it clear that we were to pack up and leave. He did not even seem to recall ever agreeing to allow us on board, despite the email exchanges that attested to it. I cried tears of disappointment and frustration as we put the deckheads back up and restored the owner’s belongings to their original, mouldy positions.

Our kind-hearted yard neighbours arrived just as we’d finished, complete with the starter battery that they had offered to lend us to help with the engines. Witnessing our dismay, they took us and our thermos of tea onto their boat, and distracted us with guided tours and requests for our advice and opinions. They sent us off to the next town with encouraging words and a great restaurant recommendation. Thank goodness for the kindness of sailors, and the French love of food. We heard from the owner of the Lagoon 47 once more, in an email where he raised the price of the boat by 20,000 euros. Needless to say, we declined, and he didn’t have the good grace to reply.

The weeks that followed were full of highs and lows, as we cast our net further afield and began looking at boat ads in the Caribbean, Panama and the States. Every time we came across a new gem (“This is the one, I can feel it!”), we would systematically be let down a few days later, with boats under offer, already sold, or withdrawn from sale… And then came an advert that stood out from the others.

She was a 48-foot catamaran that had been designed for the owner’s father, who was in a wheelchair. A wonderfully clever construction, making almost all of the boat was accessible to severely disabled sailors. The idea of being able to work with disabled sailing charities was something which we had never discussed but which I had always secretly imagined us doing further down the line. When Henrique showed me the advert, I cried again, although this time they were tears of joy.

In between times, I had been head-hunted and until we set sail I will be working on the construction of one of the world’s largest private yachts, and the refit of another, in Northern Germany. Henrique and I took virtual tours of the catamaran, discussed at length with her lady owners, and both fell head-over-heels in love with the boat, her story and the possibilities that she promised for our project. The only problem? She was berthed in Martinique; the owners insisted (and we agreed) that we couldn’t buy her without at least one of having viewed her. The timing couldn’t have been worse – it was the beginning of the school holidays in France, and tickets were painfully expensive, but the price we had provisionally agreed for the cat was just far enough below our budget to buy Henrique a return ticket, spending just 23 hours on the island.

And so he went; an exhausting round trip, from which he returned with a camera full of photos and a head full of dreams. The boat was tired, and in need of some love, but we quickly thought of solutions to all her little faults. The owners had agreed to grant us a week to decide, as we needed to factor in the price to ship her to Europe on a cargo, or hire crew to sail her back with us. The quotes came through, were negotiated down, and three days after Henrique’s return – on my 29th birthday – with hearts racing and emotions high, we decided to buy her.

The next day, when time zones permitted, Henrique called the owners to offer the asking price. At work, I jumped at every beep from my phone, waiting for news and trying to keep clients off the line… The message arrived: “Grosse déception”. Huge disappointment. The gentlemen’s agreement – or rather, a handshake between fellow sailors – reserving the boat for us for a week had not been honored, and two days previously someone had shown up on the dock with a cheque. We can only imagine that the owners were strapped for cash and, seeing the colour of money, jumped at the first opportunity.

Apparently, the boat is destined to become a floating bakery, and will no longer be used to help disabled guests learn to sail in near-total autonomy. A sad loss, and an expensive blow for our non-profit organization, which we are funding from our own savings.

And so the search continued, with nothing new on the market, and fewer adverts every day as boats over our budget were snapped up to be prepared for the summer.

But every cloud has a silver lining, and we found out that a boat that we had viewed in Corsica a few months previously was still for sale. We had discounted her, as the owner did not want to haul her for a survey until the Spring, when he intended to give her a fresh coat of antifouling and sail for the summer with his family if a buyer had not been found. Ten days later, we were back on the overnight ferry to Corsica, this time taking the budget option, bedding down on the bar sofas with a bottle of rum, a blanket and ear plugs. We left no stone unturned during the visit, climbing the mast, diving with snorkels in freezing water to check out the state of her bottom paint (non-existent), and drawing up a list of jobs with the owner.

Back home, we used our shipyard experience and our growing collection of catalogues to match numbers to the list, and made a calculated, sensible offer, subject to a haul out and survey. These took place a week later, and the news wasn’t great, but wasn’t unexpected either: one keel full of water, and the beginnings of osmosis on one hull. We have both pulled much larger ships apart and solved much larger problems in our careers, so these jobs held no fear for us, and we offered to go ahead with the purchase.

After so many disappointments, both large and small, I don’t think either of us really believed it would actually go through. When the owner called us to say that he had been researching Mission Ocean, had read articles in the French press about us, and was more than keen to help us out, we couldn’t believe it. Reliving the moment to write this, I have goosebumps on my arms and a silly grin on my face. We received and signed the contract just a couple of days ago and, after a vote on our Facebook page to choose her new name, we are absolutely over the moon to present our home for the next three years, our 42’ Fountaine Pajot, Contigo.

Mission Ocean is proudly supported by: Spade anchors, Aquatabs water treatment, Satoriz organic supermarkets, Navigair engineering solutions, Storm Bird shoes, Boero yacht coating, the town of Cannes, France, and Sail-world.com