Charlie and I were headed to the beach, which was particularly wonderful for us because we’d been away from Florida beaches for far too long. Although he’d spent quite a bit more time in New York than I had, I feel that I suffered the most from the lack of emerald-colored salt water. Why is that? Because it’s my blog, and I say so.
You're looking the wrong way, moron.
When we came back home to Florida, we brought with us a fabulous little MORC race boat that had been donated to his school, SUNY Maritime College. We’d put a lot of work into this thing, most of it during the winter. Charlie is the one who made us work on it in the snow, by the way. He made all these promises of hot chocolate and space heaters. Guess who never got her Swiss Miss. Even through all of the forced labor, I ended up falling in love with the boat. To this day we haven’t splashed our little G&S 25, and it’s all because of a new girl who caught Charlie’s eye.
There’s something you should know; Charlie can name a sailboat model from a mile away. I wish to God this was something that paid.
Back to the supposed beach trip: we had to stop at a boatyard to check on Charlie’s dad’s Mako 21 which had been having some engine troubles. In the haul-out slip at this boatyard floated a huge wreck of a derelict vessel, which never even caught my eye. Charlie, on the other hand, recognized it immediately as one of the boats that had been on his dream-boat list for as long as he could remember. He walked right into the service department and asked the first person he saw, “what’s the deal with that Compass 47 out there?”
“Is that what it is? It’s yours for five thousand dollars.”
“Sold.”
Compass 47 what? I had no idea, and didn't really care to, at this point.
The gentleman behind the counter then handed over an N95 mask and gave one last warning, “it’s pretty moldy and gross inside. Oh, and it’s full of wasps.”
You would think Charlie had just been assigned a top secret fact-finding mission by the President himself, while I’d just earned a near guaranteed stab with an Epi-Pen. Going through this boat was serious business for serious people. Charlie was enchanted by things that were giving me the creeps. I wasn’t entirely sure he was seeing the same things I was, and was tempted to administer a field sobriety test. He insisted, though: this boat could be brought back to life. He then let me know that he’d just seen one sell on YachtWorld for $120,000. I must have blinked at him strangely a few times, because I started seeing black spots. All I could say was, “sold.”
We did eventually make it to the beach. The entire time we were there, Charlie was sweating the Compass. We had yet to deal with the broker, and we weren’t satisfied that the verbal agreement with the service technician at the boatyard constituted a deal done. The broker would end up being hard to hook up with, only because he wasn’t too concerned with this hunk-of-junk he had on his hands. He didn’t even know what it was, and we weren’t about to tell him.
