Another So Cal trip

We made the six and a half hour drive to Marina del Rey

yesterday to meet Denny and Steph on Spellbound.  When we met Denny back in February we really hit it off with him.  He’s a great guy.  His wife Steph is equally cool.  We arrived at the boat and they were very gracious and told us to look at everything.  Rich made a beeline for the mast step.  Rich had asked Denny on the phone if he’d ever had problems with the mast step.  Denny told Rich he didn’t know of any problems.  Endeavours are notorious for having mast step problems, so we really wanted to see what condition this one was in.  We were pleasantly surprised.  The step was dry and looked good.

In general the interior of the boat looked great.  The teak woodwork is in fantastic shape.  The V-berth was long enough to stretch out.  The storage is amazing.  Neither of us like parquee flooring but it’s not bad and it was in really good shape.  The engine room was fairly clean.  There’s a Westerbeke generator that doesn’t work and takes up a lot of space.  We could remove it and have plenty of room for an air compressor and other gear.  There’s a large workbench/storage area in the walkthrough across from the engine room.  The boat doesn’t have a head with a separate shower stall, but it has two good sized heads and one could easily be used as a shower.  The aft cabin is great.  They converted the hanging locker to shelving, which I would probably change back to a hanging locker.  Everything was very clean.

Up top, the boat is in decent shape.  The main is new, the canvas dodger and sail cover are new.  The gelcoat was in good shape, not all crazed with stress fractures like we saw on the E38.  The stanchions and lifelines are a nice height and appeared sturdy.  Denny said the rigging was old, and it looked old but not in bad shape.  He said he’d never changed it, and they’ve owned the boat since 1992, which means the rigging is probably original (yikes!)  Denny started the engine and it fired right up and sounded good

We spent three hours with Denny and Steph.  Mostly we talked about the boat, but we also chatted about cruising, the state of society in America, our jobs and our future plans and their plans to move to Panama.  They asked us if we’d ever seen the movie Captain Ron!  We were cracking up.  What are the chances that they would ask us about the silly movie that made us believe we wanted to go cruising?  They genuinely seemed so excited that we are planning to go cruising and were very encouraging.  I think we made a good impression and presented ourselves as trustworthy enough that they may be inclined to carry some of the paper on the boat for a couple years.  Every boat is going to have some problems and projects, especially a 28 year old boat.  Overall the pluses outweigh the minuses by about 5 to 1 so we are still going to try our best to make this boat happen.

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