Fingers and toes are all crossed! Early tomorrow morning we will be on the road to Toronto where our hopefully new boat is being hauled out of the water to be surveyed. We will be meeting our surveyor Richard Hutchings and Katana's owners Anthony and Jackie Motley at the Port Credit Marina. The survey is a big deal as it is the final step before we will officially be boat owners! It is obvious to us that Anthony and Jackie…

Closely related to the last topic of "where will we go?" is "how are we going to find our way there?" This is where the previously mentioned navigation skills will come into play. After spending most of Father's Day afternoon down by the Lake Ontario watching the boats (and letting our dog play in the water) we spent an hour watching our new DVD: Annapolis Book of Seamanship: Sailboat Navigation. Let's just say that this DVD will need to be…

We're not sure exactly where we'll end up sailing to but we now have a big selection of Cruising Guides to help us make up our minds!

From what we hear and read it seems that many (most?) people who purchase a boat are constantly spending money on it. We have decided to do things backwards and buy everything needed for a boat before we actually get one! :) We spend so much time in West Marine that they just about know us by name. We are definitely going to have to visit the other chandleries in town just to shake things up. Today we visited Collin's…

Man we are having fun. I should point out though that we also consider full-contact sparring to be fun from time to time too! Today's fun involved trying to find a slip for our new boat (we are thinking positively that the sale will go through as planned). We have long read that a challenge with Catamarans is finding a slip wide enough to accommodate them. We assumed that because the beam on a PDQ 32 is only 16' it…

With the Purchase and Sale agreement signed and sent off with a big deposit cheque the next step in the boat-buying process is the Marine Survey. A Marine Survey is "a detailed inspection of a boat for the purpose of determining its current condition and seaworthiness. In particular, to determine if the vessel is safe to use in conditions for which it was designed, and what maintenance and repairs are required, or are likely to be required in the near…