The exchange rate improved. Jaap, as he put it, “sharpened his pencil” to refine his asking price. The wily old man also sent some brief video clips of himself singlehanding Sentijn across the North Sea at what must have been 9 knots just the week before. I watched them often.
Then there was a scramble to identify a marine surveyor in the Netherlands. It was summer time, and they were all off sailing. Finally, we made arrangements and I sent special instructions for a thorough hull unltrasound to check for any wasting from electrolysis. The result, as we’d expected, were that Sentijn was impressive but needed whole barrels of elbow grease and sported a 5-figure maintenance backlog. We’d sworn up and down that we would not buy a project boat; if Sentijn wasn’t a project boat, she was damn close.
We bought her anyway.
It was a calculated risk. A lot of the things that made Sentijn a yachty yacht–the paint, teak, etc–were in tough shape and would cost a small fortune to replace (see the terrifying price curves on the Koopmans website here.) The space under the paint curve suggests a cost of fifty thousand euros–not including removal of old coatings. Even worse, the gap for joinery expands into the 100,000 euro range for a 12 meter yacht. This greatly discouraged other potential buyers, allowing us to drive a hard bargain–assuming we could find a way to deal with such aspects more economically. I had a few ideas; after all, we weren’t really looking for a yachtsman’s yacht anyway. We were after a cruising home.
It was time to see how much trouble we’d gotten ourselves into. We flew to Holland, cast of the dock lines, and ran hard aground.
Full speed ahead.
Sentijn 