How hard can it be? You want a bigger boat. You search for a bigger boat. You find a bigger boat. Then you buy a bigger boat. Except it rarely runs as smoothly as that…
We bought our bigger boat in January last year and had her delivered in February, but the search started three years ago. In fact, the process itself began at least a year before that when I set out to persuade my wife Jillie that we needed to upgrade our 19ft Yamarin 59 HT.
Putting on a dodgy American accent and quoting Chief Brody from Jaws with the immortal line “We’re gonna need a bigger boat!” would have been counterproductive. And my actual thought process of “I would like a bigger boat because I want a bigger boat, because it would be nice to have a bigger boat,” wasn’t going to cut it either. Much like the infamous N+1 formula, which states that the optimal number of cars/golf clubs/surfboards etc is the number you already have +1, I just felt we needed a bigger boat.
While Jillie wasn’t averse to the idea, she did start asking awkward questions such as: Where would we keep it? What would the annual running costs be? How much would we use it? Even I had to admit that these were valid points, especially the last one – I’m a farmer so August is my busiest month.
After a lot of pestering, of a level that a three-year-old would have been proud of, Jillie came around to the idea of a larger vessel (or at least got bored of my whining) and relented to start looking at potential boats. Thankfully, marina browsing
