The Purchase

In the spring of 2001, my wife, Laura, and I were talking about remodeling our house. We had purchased a nice little house in the town of Eleanor (named for Mrs. Roosevelt) when we moved to West Virginia in 1993. As happens with houses, we wanted a little more room and a nicer kitchen and a few things like that but we knew it was going to take major renovations to turn our house into what we wanted. Driving to work one morning, (Laura and I both worked for the same employer at the time) I noticed a packet of flyers hanging from the mailbox of a house that was for sale in the neighboring town of Winfield (named for General Winfield Scott, aka "Old Fuss and Feathers"). We had driven by this house numerous times, noting the for-sale sign and commenting on how nice it looked. On a lark, I whipped the car into the driveway and Laura grabbed one of the flyers. Laura called the number on the flyer and arranged for us to go see the house. To make a long introduction to a story short, we ended up buying the house figuring that it would be a lot easier to move than to renovate.

Our new house was on a riverfront lot with a boat dock out back. We looked forward to one day parking a boat at our dock, after we had a little time to recover financially from all the moving expenses and so forth.

One Saturday, in the fall of 2001, we were visiting my mother in law, Dottie, at her house in Ravenswood. (Since I did this for Eleanor and Winfield, I feel obliged to mention that the town of Ravenswood is named for a character in Sir Walter Scott's gothic novel "The Bride of Lammermoor") Dottie mentioned a widow friend who had a boat for sale and said she wanted us to go take a look at it. Candy, wife of Laura's older brother, (Is she my sister in law? I've never quite understood how that all ties together.) went with us to help find the place and offer her two cents' worth. After a fifteen minute drive, we found the friend's house. The boat was in her garage, where it had been sitting since its original owner died five years earlier. I wrote down some details on the back of a business card: "1977 Signa Thunderbird S-18 trihull with Mercruiser 165 I/O." It had been set up as a bass fishing boat. An electric trolling motor was mounted on the front and a home-made live well was under one of the back seats. We looked it over not really knowing anything about what we were looking at and then said our goodbyes.

After we got back to Dottie's house, Candy called her brother who lives in South Carolina and who trades in boats. We described the boat to him and he said it was worth about a third to half of the asking price. And that's only if nothing had gone bad from sitting unused all that time, which was unlikely. We didn't have any credits in the boat budget at that time anyway, so we just forgot about it.

Dottie didn't forget about it, though. As the spring of 2002 approached, she suggested that she'd like to buy her friend's boat and give it to us. Talk about mixed feelings. Here I am about to get a free boat, but it's a 25 year-old boat that's been sitting unused for years and probably is rife with problems. About the only person on the planet that I could think of who might know less about boats than me was Dottie. I checked the NADA book value and asked around a bit to confirm what Candy's brother had said about the asking price and reminded Dottie that it seemed a bit high. She said, "Oh, who says? They haven't even seen it." I could see her mind locking into "this is what I'm going to do and nothing's going to stop me" mode. It's a hereditary thing: I've seen it happen to Laura numerous times.

I suggested to Dottie that she look around and see what else is available, boat-wise. I told her that she could probably find something at least ten years newer and ready to run for the same price. It became obvious, though that she didn't just want to buy a boat. She wanted to buy that boat. I suggested she have it appraised by someone who knows boats even though I knew she had no intention of negotiating with her friend for a more reasonable price. I told her that none of us, including the seller, knew whether it would run or float after sitting so long so she should get a third party to give it a thorough check out before she committed to anything. She agreed with that last bit.

One Friday afternoon at work, Laura got a call on her cell phone. It was Dottie. Somebody was coming to check out the boat and Dottie asked if I could get away from work to be there. I couldn't. I asked if she trusted the guy who was doing the checkout. She had never met him. He was a friend of the seller.

Dottie called later that day to report that the check out guy had given the boat a clean bill of health and she'd bought it. She'd bring the papers to us the following week.

Since I didn't have a tow vehicle, we asked around and found a guy named Ron who would go get the boat, put it in the river and show me how to operate it, all for $150. Dottie brought us the paperwork and after two separate hour-long-wait visits to the DMV and about $100 in fees, Laura got all the title and license stuff taken care of.

Next: The Trip Home

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