Tag: Bristol 24

Selling Pegu Club

It’s too bad that we couldn’t keep both boats, because we really love Pegu Club.  She’s been a fantastic boat, and we were sorry to have to put her on the market.  But it had to be done.

We put an ad on sailboatlistings.com (which is how we had originally found Pegu Club), and I also put ads on the Craigs List for Eastern Connecticut, New Haven County, Fairfield County, and Rhode Island.  We weren’t going to give her away, but we definitely priced her to sell.  As soon as the ads were up I called the guy in Clinton who I had spoken to the previous week (who had just sold his Bristol 29.9 and was looking for a Bristol 24).

He had saved my number in his phone and picked up right away.  We talked for a bit and I told him he could see her on sailboatlistings and to call me if he had any questions.  A few minutes later he called back, and he and his wife wanted to see her the next day!  Since we usually go down on Friday and we still needed to get her ready to sell, we agreed on Saturday morning, and I promised I wouldn’t sell her out from under him.  Now it was time to get to work. Continue reading “Selling Pegu Club” →

How did we get here?

We (Kimberly and Jeff) were avid cyclists for years – until one day we weren’t anymore. In March of 2012 I (Kimberly) was trying to figure out what to do for a hobby since I was no longer riding virtually every day. Suddenly I found myself thinking about how I used to spend a month every summer when I was a kid sailing a Snark on Mission Bay. I loved being on the water – how about sailing again?

A quick Google search led me to discover that adult community sailing lessons were starting at Mystic Seaport that Sunday. It was obviously meant to be. I texted Jeff and said, “I’m going to take sailing lessons at Mystic Seaport.” He texted back, “Cool! Can I come too?” And so it began.

After 10 weeks of lessons at Mystic Seaport on 9 foot Dyer Dhows, and three capsizes into the frigid Mystic River (two for Kimberly, one for Jeff), we were hooked. Later that month we took an ASA 101 class at Narragansett Sailing in Barrington, RI on a Bristol 19. The class was three days, and it came with an additional sixteen hours of practice time which we used up that summer.

Jeff began scouring sailboatlistings.com and yachtworld.com for a sailboat, but I wasn’t yet convinced that it was a smart thing to do, financially (spoiler alert: it’s not, but it’s totally worth it). He looked all winter while I humored him, occasionally glancing over at the computer monitor when he would point out a boat that he particularly liked. I would browse occasionally, but I hadn’t bought into the idea yet.

In March, 2013 I was looking at sailboatlistings.com when I saw a Bristol 24 in Groton, CT. There was something about the boat. I looked at all of the pictures and studied the description. “Hey Jeff, take a look at this boat.” Jeff looked at the monitor and said that he had seen that same boat a few weeks ago. I couldn’t stop staring at it. Maybe we should buy a boat….

A few days later we were down at Pine Island Marina looking at her. We didn’t know much, but we knew she was in great shape. The owner inspired confidence, and he was planning on staying at Pine Island with his next boat so he wasn’t going to drop off the face of the earth once we paid him. We knew she was the one, but we also didn’t think we could buy the first boat we looked at, so we tried to playit cool and told him we’d let him know.

36 hours later (and after looking at four other boats), we bought the first boat we had looked at – a 1975 Bristol Corsair 24.

Since then we’ve learned a lot, had a bunch of fun, occasionally been a little scared, and have only become more hooked. The plan now is to sail Pegu Club for seven more years and then buy the “big boat” – the one we’re going to cruise on after we retire and sell virtually everything we own. The Caribbean, Central America, Bermuda, hopefully even the Med. We’ll do it as long as we feel like it. To borrow from the title of a book about Lin and Larry Pardey ‘s cruising adventures, we’ll do it “As long as it’s fun.”