A Sail of Two Idiots Read Online Free PDF

over the Internet because friends and family
not
going through the process thought it was hysterical. I duplicate it because so many lessons will be learned that I could almost end the book afterwards.
    June 19–22, 2006
    You call this a sea trial—I object!
    So, we caught our flight to Fort Lauderdale and left 45 minutes late which got us to Fort Lauderdale after 5 p.m.
    Since our broker was out of town, he paid the seller’s broker to fly down and help us out (isn’t she on the seller’s side? well, um, ok). She flew in from Philly the same evening and took us to a popular diner. Afterwards, we all excitedly headed to the dock, just to take a quick look at the boat and to see exactly how to get there, hoping to make things easier on us in the morning (it didn’t matter, we got lost anyway).
    Fort Lauderdale is full of canals (more than Venice), so a lot of people rent out the docks behind their homes, and that’s how this boat was situated. It was getting dark, but we found the boat and surprised the guy who was supposedly maintaining and captaining it (an accountant by trade). We listened in as he told Ms. Selling Broker that he found several things that needed fixing (mind you, none of these things were what eventually went wrong). Michael and I stood at the dock looking at a real live catamaran and tried to let it sink in that we were really doing this (trying not to notice the half-deflated dinghy lying forlornly on the dock). We stood there for a looooooong moment.
    Then we boarded the boat and saw all kinds of water damage inside. The “new” carpet was water-stained, and the kitchen parquet flooring was a little … “soft.” The lights down below wouldn’t turn on, so we couldn’t see that part. Note to self: don’t trust pictures, even if there are over 100 of them; apparently don’t trust brokers either. As we left the boat, I complained that it really smelled like diesel, surely that couldn’t be normal. I didn’t remember smelling that when on other cats. Although concerned that we might have made a big mistake, we still liked the layout and size and were reminded that water damage could be fixed. More importantly, the boat was the right price.
    We were supposed to leave the dock at 9 a.m. to head over to the shipyard where the boat would be hauled out of the water, so we got there half an hourearly. Our surveyor (the only guy on our side for this event) was already on the boat and said that when he got there the whole canal was layered with diesel fuel. While Mr. Accountant/Maintenance Guy/Captain was off buying other parts (the anchor windlass—the motor that brings the anchor up/down—wouldn’t go in reverse), our surveyor discovered that our bilge was full of diesel (hence the smell I noted the night before) and that the diesel fuel filter bowl was cracked (of course, this boat doesn’t use a typical filter setup). The maintenance guy/captain had assumed the nastiness in the canal was from some other loser, but the surveyor discovered that the leak was, in fact, coming from
this
boat (
we
were the losers). It took a while to jury-rig the filter and then to find more fuel for our tanks, so we had to keep calling the boatyard, making sure they could still haul us out. Meanwhile, the surveyor was walking around and noting all kinds of things that were broken, wouldn’t turn on, weren’t connected, etc. Sure, we could, and probably should, have cut our losses here, but we were assured that these issues were not only minor but normal, and that if we were going to own a boat, we might as well get used to it. We felt we were already committed, didn’t have any other boats to look at, and still liked the boat price, so soldiered on.
    We finally took off down the canal system (once we got unstuck from the mud—it was now low tide) and had to stop at about four bridges to have them opened (it was kind of cool making