The
month since my last blog post has been packed with change. I’ve held off
writing this post until now because our plans for life after our sailing trip
were uncertain and I wanted to wait until final decisions had been made before
sharing them. Firstly,
Dave and I decided to put Desolina up for sale. While she has been a amazing
home to us for the past two years and we think she is an awesome boat, we don’t
have any definite sailing plans for the immediate future.
The
obvious next step would be to do an offshore sailing trip, but I have to be
honest and say I’m not sure how enthusiastic I feel about doing long passages.
We think it would also be prudent to get some experience crewing on someone
else’s boat before we took on that huge responsibility for ourselves. Now
having gained some experience of owning and living on a boat, we’ve also
developed and refined our opinions about what we would want, and look for if we
were to buy another boat in the future. While Desolina is a perfectly capable
offshore cruiser, we’ve now got a list of features we’d look for in another
boat. Of course no boat is perfect and you’re always going to have to make
compromises, but I think owning Desolina has given us the opportunity to
develop some opinions about what we think our perfect boat would look like.
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| At the helm, Bay of Islands |
At
any rate, it seemed sensible to put Desolina up for sale, since we have no
immediate plans for her. Too many boats lay abandoned in marinas, with their
owners only sailing them a handful of days per year and we didn’t want to be
one of those owners. Not to mention the money we’d be haemorrhaging on
maintenance and marina fees on a yacht we wouldn’t have the time to use when we’re
back in full time employment. Funnily enough, living aboard in Wellington
wasn’t on the top of my list of accommodation options for the coming year.
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| Rainbow Falls, Kerikeri |
Amazingly,
Desolina sold 38 days after first listing her! I think that must be some kind
of record. Luckily the right person came along at the right time. It was
bittersweet selling her; although we are happy to have sold her so quickly,
it’s also sad to wave farewell to our first home. It’s nice to know she will be
put to good use with her new owner though, who plans to take her cruising
around the Pacific Islands. The timing of the sale also couldn’t have been
better as we handed over ownership the day after we moved off the boat.
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| Desolina in all her glory! |
Once
we knew the sale was definitely going through, we took her out for one last
farewell sail and night on anchor in the Bay of Islands. It was a wonderful
last trip out on her. We had a beautiful sunset in a still anchorage all to
ourselves (everyone else had already packed up because it was COLD!), a
downwind sail to return to the marina with our spinnaker sail up, and a very
brief ‘hello’ from some dolphins during the last hour of sailing before heading
into the marina for the final time.
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| Last night at anchor. It was certainly getting cold! |
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| Final sunset from the boat |
We
previously made a trip back down to Wellington at the start of May for a
friend’s wedding, and to retrieve our car so we could move our personal
belongings off Desolina. Since then, we’ve driven A LOT of miles, from
Wellington up to the Bay of Islands to pack up the boat, and then driving all
the way down south to Queenstown, where we are going to be living for the next 10
weeks over winter.
It’s
a bit of a shock to the system coming from a long summer on the boat to full on
snowy winter conditions in Queenstown. However it feels good to be back on the
South Island and we’re ready to start the next chapter in our lives. I’ll let
you know how life is going in Queenstown in the next post, but in the meantime
I’ll leave you with some photos of our last few days sailing around the Bay of
Islands.
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| Panorama of our final anchorage, all to ourselves |
