OMG – we have a yacht!

WOW what a roller coaster the last 3 weeks have been!

You will have read in the last post that we had put in an offer on a yacht in French Polynesia. If you have been following us on Facebook you would have seen a week ago that we found out that someone else had offered full price on the yacht which put us out of the running and put us both in a funk.  After pouting for a day we then put an offer in on the same style boat however this one was in England – gulp.
The bright side of this was that this yacht had had some big stuff on the boat that had just recently been replaced (engine, sails) which offset the fact that this one was on the other side of the world.
We put through an offer (EURO 78000) which was not far off what they were asking (EURO 82000) and within a couple of hours we found out our offer was accepted!! We had put through the stipulations that obviously the sale was conditional to a survey.  We then spent a day or two on the internet searching for a surveyor for a reasonable price and organising a wire transfer of 10% through the bank for the boat itself. We finally found someone and gave him the thumbs up to do a survey on the boat (NZD $950). Once we had organised that we were then left in limbo waiting…. waiting…. waiting for it to be done (the following Tuesday 28th Feb) and for the initial report to be sent through to us.
On the Tuesday that we knew the report was being done in England (12 hours behind NZ time) we received an email from the broker in Tahiti saying that the deal there had fallen through and the seller had lowered his price. We replied saying we had put an offer through on another yacht however we would stay in contact.

That Tuesday was such a long day, every 5 minutes we would refresh our emails to see if the report had come through, we were both really restless and couldn’t find any activity that would take our attention away from refreshing the emails.

We finally got the email through late that night noting there was some major problems which included possible hull damage below the waterline – um red flag! Craig and I quickly discussed our options and both of us agreed this was a no go and we quickly sent an email to the English brokers letting them know that due to some major issues we were backing out. We soon received an email from them saying they were unaware of any of the problems we had mentioned and were happy to refund our deposit. One boat gone!

We then sent an email to the broker in French Polynesia and put through a new offer of EURO 84000 where they were asking EURO 88000 (NZD $133000.00).  Where the problem lies was that although the broker was one day and one hour behind us the seller had moved back to France which is 12 hours behind.

Once we made the offer we then had to wait 8 or more hours for the broker to convey our offer to the seller and then come back to us. Our offer was turned down however the seller dropped their price to EURO 87000 (NZD $131000) and we decided then and there we didn’t want to miss out on this, we loved the boat so we agreed to their price and had to wait another 8 hours to find out whether it was accepted – it was!

From that point on (this afternoon) it has been full speed ahead, we have sent the deposit through, tomorrow (Saturday) we sign and send the ownership papers through. Sunday we have booked our flights to Tahiti where we will be spending a few nights at an Airbnb before we step aboard our new floating home.
 

My head is now spinning with the speed that everything has been happening, from days where we have sat around waiting for an email to come through to now where we have just over one day to get everything done and dusted before our new adventurous life begins.