My weekend hasn't been all about gray spots, nay. Today was all about craigslist.
I've only recently discovered craigslist (I know, I know, welcome to like 2002, dude) and now that I've joined the rest of you in the present day, I surf it often.
Why? Well...
a) it's like window shopping. Only the windows is rather small and made of text, often without any image of what you're supposed to be buying and that text is sometimes so fraught with typos and terrible grammar that "lol whut u mad?" looks like Jane Austen wrote it
b) there's some neat stuff for sale!
c) some of that stuff might be useful
d) some of the useful stuff might be cheap.
It all comes back to the money, baby, all back to the green. Yo.
Anyway, during one of my surf sessions, I spotted a
dinghy for sale in a nearby community for the interesting price of less than I paid for my boat. Believe me, not a lot of
dinghies cost that little. The ad stated that it needed
repair but I'm not adverse to
repair, I'm all over
repair, just show me a
repair and I'm ready for it.
I put it on the "hmmm" shelf and went on browsing. Another ad, this time for bottom
paint. ::read read:: In brown? Ugh.
The same guy also posts that he's getting rid of some Teak Oil, Teak brightener and Teak Other stuff for a reasonable low price. Since it so happens I'm in the market for Teak oil and what not, I'm all over that like a gnat in freshly rolled Interlux; off goes the email.
The next day dawns, and I poke around the computer. I notice that the
dinghy is now one hundred bucks less than I saw it yesterday. Cool. So I call the guy. (note: the day dawning for me means like after 11am, so I'm not waking anyone up) The fellow is cheerful enough and lets me know that not only does he have the one
dinghy, he has a lot.
May I come down and take a look at them?
Yes, please do!
I roust even-later-sleeping husband out of bed and tell him it's too nice of a day to stay inside, let's go drive around.
Dinghy Man lives down a realllllllly long dirt road in a part of the state that's a bit "expensive nice country estate"-ish. His estate is not particularly posh but lived in and homey. He does live by a large pond, though, which means that as soon as his property comes available, someone will buy it, tear down any existing structures and promptly cram a house way too big for the lot in its place.
Anyway, he's an older fellow with a salty sailor thing going, a widower, and quite talkative, in a good way. I like him immediately. His lot has a modest brown house, a three car size garage/workshop building, and a very large Rotty-Newfoundland mix that lumbers up slowly to check us out. The dog is so big that *my* dog, sitting in the car, doesn't even woof at it; maybe he thought it was a particularly ambulatory rock. I dunno.
The garage/workshop is just brimming with a lifetime of stuff, including many, many cast iron wood
stoves of all kinds. Indeed, if one wants a cast iron wood
stove and can't find one, I can tell you were they went.
"Yeah, I'm a stove guy..."
He's also a boat guy. There's a Contessa 26 on a freshly built new spiffy trailer (his "new" boat he's downsized to) and a Vineyard Vixen over yonder and some big covered power thingie he called a trawler.
"I was gonna give up sail when my wife got sick..."
Awww.
And there are dinghies. Big dinghies, small dinghies, bass/duck boat dinghy, blue plastic West Marine type dinghie, wood dinghies, fiberglass dinghies. (
"Got too many dinghies!")
There's a Joel White 12 foot "one of a kind" that was his wife's boat (Awwww again), a Fatty Knees, a wooden canoe-shaped one painted in pastel green and pink (
"Guy who built it was from Italy so..." Hee.), some flat as a pancake Laser-like thing, and so on.
I was peppered with friendly questions that I don't have answers to yet, like moorings.
"Rye? I got a mooring in Rye. You won't live long enough to get a mooring in Rye." (referring to the very long waiting list for a rather small harbor)
He tells me that the dinghy I came to look at needs fixing and that we don't want to get into that (to which my brain went "Oh? I don't want to fix things? Hah hah! I accept your challenge! We shall duel at dawn!"
) and it would not make a great tender, being too heavy. He also asks me how much I want to spend; he's got dinghies from $200 to much more. I told him I don't want to spend more on a dinghy than I spent on my boat. Like the Guess Your Weight Guy at a fair, he then tells me what we spent on the boat (
"Hmmm. Six thousand.")
I tell him what we paid for it ($500). I get the usual grilling about what's wrong with it, and so on. I give that information, we chat about that for a bit and then it's back to dinghies, now in the price range I'm looking for.
(Note: lest you think my husband roams around with a muzzle, I should explain that he is the more silent, internal type of fellow. If he has a question, he'll pipe in, but I'm always the one leading the verbal charge. So it's not like he's being made to sit in the car or something; he's following us around during all this, muzzle-free.)
We disregard the plastic thing and the metal duck boat. I'd have to wear camo and have a trolling motor to feel right in that. That leaves three sailing dinghies and the $150 dollar dinghy that I saw in the ad.
I want to mull the choices over and tell him so. In the meantime, I point over to something that caught my eye the minute we pulled in, something tucked away against the side of the house behind the Vineyard Vixen, something I've been waiting to ask him about.
What is it? Why it's...
BOAT STANDS! LOTS AND LOTS OF BOAT STANDS! Squee!
"Oh, you need boat stands?"
Even Husband said "yes!" for that question.
He'd sell us five for a total price of $150.
Yay! I do so like this "stumbling onto a good thing" we seem to have going lately.
On the way out, I did stop and check over the dinghy he said I didn't want, esp. since he dropped the price $50 while we were there.
It's listed as a 1960 Beverly Dinghy. Here's what one blurb had to say about it:
This roomy, well-balanced dinghy was designed to meet the requirements of the Beverly Yacht Club. They required a light, smart sailboat with simple
rig, ample flotation to ensure safety in a boat to be used not only as a one-design racer, but also as yacht tender.
It is pretty heavy, and it was in rough shape. It has no rudder, no
rig, no nuthin'. Of course I liked it. Of course I want it. Next payday.... *plot plot plan plan*
After this, we ended up driving up NH's whopping 12 miles of coastline, then connected with Teak Oil guy and picked that up.
All in all, a productive boat-but-not-at-the-boat day.
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