James & Carolanne

Well, I'm not certain if missionaries are allowed to do stuff like this, but I've recently become the new owner of an old boat.

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On Tuesday evening when I got home from work, my wife suggested that we go look at a surprise that she had for me.  So, we headed out down a road near our place until we got to a driveway with a boat on it.  We pulled in and Carolanne basically just said "Well, what do you think?".  Now, this yard and boat is on the same road I take to go home from work every day, and I had seen the boat for sale there for a while.  The problem was it looked fairly old, and the people wanted $2800 for it.

Now, I have wanted to get a boat for a while but had basically written off the idea realizing that we had a number of problems with getting one.

1. We live in a small townhouse and only have one parking spot, so we have nowhere to put the boat.
2. We only have one smallish car with no hitch, so we really have no way to tow the boat.
3. We don't have the $10K that I estimated it would take to buy a decent boat.

I had often joked that it would probably take about half a million dollars for me to be able to get one because we would have to buy the boat (40K for anything nice), we would have to buy a truck to tow the boat (60K for something decent), and we would have to buy a larger house to park both the boat and the truck (400K for anything near Abbotsford).  This essentially killed the boat dreams before they could grow too large.

However, having gone to see this one, my wife told me that my father-in-law had already been to see this boat, had checked it out thoroughly, and had bartered the people down from $2800 to $1500.  How could I refuse?  So, long story short, I had a few other people come look at it and give me their opinions, and then went ahead and bought the boat using a portion of the very handy tax rebate that came a few weeks before.  As for towing it, my brother-in-law towed it back to Abbotsford with his truck, and we surprised my dad by putting it on his driveway.

Now, as you can tell from the pictures it needs a bit of TLC but my wife says it'll be good excercise for me.  I was very concerned at first whether or not it would be a lemon but there are no gaping holes in the hull so in theory it should float and we fired it up the other day and after a little coaxing it ran quite well.

For the boating fanatics who are interested it's apparently a 17 foot Hourston Glasscraft with a 3.0L Merc inboard/outboard.  Having never owned or even driven a boat of this sort before, it's going to be an interesting learning experience, but if anyone has advice or suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them.  Also, if anyone would like to go boating with me, all you have to do is provide the truck to tow it, and I'm more than willing to take her out.

We're also open to name suggestions, as I'm told every good boat needs a name.  If we can't find a good name, we're simply going to write "BOAT" across the back in large letters.  :)