Last Updated on October 18, 2023 by Jill
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Wow! How the time gets away from you. I was hoping to post this last week when we returned from the boat show but a little side illness had other plans. Ok, well let me tell you how the Miami boat show went.
We arrived in Miami Friday morning and headed over to the Strictly Sail portion of the show to look at the sailboats first. The weather was beautiful it couldn’t have been a better day for looking at all the beautiful boats. We saw some really neat boats and got a lot of great ideas for our own boat. We were, however, a little disappointed by the lack of boats that were available to view there, we were really hoping to see a lot more. I was really hoping to see some other companies as well but, it was still great to see what they had. Let’s be honest though most of these boats were way more than we can or were willing to spend, it is still a great idea to help you narrow down what you want in a boat. For us, it was a great way to look at center cockpit and aft cockpit boats to compare how they would work for us and our dog. We were able to check out different types of layouts below deck and what we preferred. We saw a lot of great ideas for storage that we could possibly add to our boat.
After we looked at all of the boats we wanted to see we headed over to the product area. At the Strictly Sail area, they also have an exhibit section with products to look at. This area was great but the bigger arena had a lot more to offer and look at. We really only saw a few things in this section that really peaked our interest. One of those was Spectra watermakers. Dave has been doing a lot of research on these and this is what we plan to put on our boat. It was great to talk with one of the guys to get a better understanding of sizes and what would work the best on the size of boat we are looking at. The people that worked there really knew their product and were able to answer some of the lingering questions we had. After leaving the Spectra booth and seeing the rest of the booths it was getting really hot and we had really seen everything in this area so we decided to head out to our hotel.
Boats for Sale
Saturday and Sunday we spent hanging out in Fort Lauderdale looking at used boats that we had found on the internet prior to arriving in Miami. I set up appointments for us to view 5 of them. We only ended up seeing 4 as one of them had gone under contract. That is the exact reason why you should never get your heart set on a boat you see online before stepping foot on the boat. You don’t want to be disappointed before even seeing it. When we decided to start looking for boats we said to each other “if they get sold or go under contract in the process of us viewing them, then it is not meant to be and there is something better out there for us”. We don’t want to get our emotions tied to any boat, while that can be hard it is better than then the emotional ups and downs. Unfortunately, we did not find a boat that we wanted to put an offer on. There was one that came close but after getting info on insurance prices we decided to start looking at boats that are less than 10 years old. (This particular boat was built in 1988) Your insurance on a younger boat is a lot cheaper as we learned. This was a great learning experience for us, and going forward we have set a length and year limit on what boats we will look at.
So, we learned a lot about new boats, old boats, criteria and just had a great time enjoying being by the water.
Cheers,
Jill
