Online Love

What’s the status of our boat search? Well, almost every day Roelof checks the ad’s and sometimes we check them together. This boat is too expansive, this is too small, has no comfortable beds…. We discuss our requirements over and over again. Roelof doubts if we don’t have too much requirements, we may need to do some compromises (hold this thought).

But it’s true, our wish list for the upcoming 5 years is different from the list for the long term… We doubt if there is a vessel that fills in all this needs. Maybe we need to buy a boat for the short term and when we are more ready for the sea, change the vessel… Also a possibility.

The dept of the boats are too big for the Frisian lakes, or the boats are too small for our family. Until Roelof shows me an interesting blog. ‘Look’, he says, ‘I read this blog last year, this is a Dutch couple that started cruising in 2017. Now they announce on their site that they will sell their boat. You need to check it’. He sounds exited, but not too much. I checked the site. And I see a familiar boat, for the third time in our boat search we are triggered by a Compromis 39. We putted her on our list, we scraped it and now… the discussions starts again… We checked this boat in Zeeland before, we thought this is not what we wanted… but now we read the adventures from this Dutch couple (again) and we ask ourselves, they can travel the world with this boat… why wouldn’t we?

I really don’t know how it is to meet a new love online, but I check the pictures over and over again… Oh, and one small detail… This boat is for sale, but when we want to see it we need to travel to the Azores…. WOEPS… So we discuss it, check it, but in our hart we think… this is not for us… we are not the kind of people who fly to the Azores to check a boat OR buy a boat unseen. We see so much struggles on the way…

And then I go to the birthday party of my little cousin and a tell this story to some people (including my brother in law). They all seem quit enthusiast, and they see no struggles at all. So Roelof and I decided to sit down and talk it through one more time. What if, and what then, if else… And we decided to put on the “naughty shoes” (😊 it’s a Dutch saying, meaning we take a step we thought we would never do). We write a mail to the Dutch couple and asked them if we could talk about the boat and their journey. We hope with a talk that we can discover if this boat is the right one for us. Because we are still not sure of that.

We are lucky, they are super nice and understand our position. They would love to talk with us and help us through our doubts. Lucky for us they planned a visit to the Netherlands and we are able to meet with them in person.

It was a very nice afternoon, they told us all kinds of stuff about their trip, their experience, their boat. After a 3 hour talk we go home with a lot of stuff to think about.