It Was A Dark And Stormy Night
October 29, 2005
Sometimes when you are sure about something, in the back of your mind there is a little itch telling you that maybe you are just fooling yourself. When we last posted we were heading down to the Annapolis Boat show to close the deal on the boat that would become Makara. After a lot of research, hundreds of questions and lots of analysis we had chosen the Swedish made Malo 43 (a new version of the Malo 41) as our Makara. We had put down a deposit and we had purchased plane tickets to Sweden to meet with the builders. Then literally on a dark and stormy night during the Annapolis boat show, which drove most of the high end yachts away from the docks for insurance reasons, we sat down to negotiate contract terms with a Malo representative and the two (that’s right not one but two) representative brokerage firms. Given that we were soaked, and the show boat for Malo was a 40 footer that was just a little cramped, we adjourned to the adjacent Passport 470, owned by Thom Wagner, the president of one of the brokerages we were dealing with (also president of Passport Yachts).
As we sat down and began to negotiate the terms of the deal in the roomy and warm Passport 470 (this particular one was a center cockpit) that little itch we were feeling began to turn into an all out rash. Finally, late into the evening after hammering out most of the deal details (buying a semi-custom European boat isn’t as easy as saying “I want one”), Nancy, as a negotiation tactic said “why wouldn’t I buy one of these instead of a Malo”. An uncomfortable chuckle met the comment and we moved on to wrap up our discussion.
At this point, it is important to note we didn’t know a lot about Passport – Judy in her comprehensive search for boats had eliminated them because on cursory examination they seemed bigger than we wanted and were a bit out of our price range – in these two ways similar to the Valiant 50 we had examined closely.
After leaving the Annapolis boat show armed with huge amounts of data and after a conversation with Nigel Calder, a Malo owner, we trundled back to our rural home and began to process all of the information we had gathered in preparation for our upcoming trip to Sweden. It was about this time things began to unravel a little bit. As you can tell from our previous posts, we have very specific ideas about the kind of boat we need. The wonderful thing about the people at Malo is that they were willing to accommodate most of our wishes. We wanted a Yanmar engine instead of a Volvo, no problem… we wanted a 750Ah battery bank, no problem (grunt)… we wanted a different ground tackle system, no problem (just major structural redesign)… we wanted something other than an itty-bitty 2 burner euro stove, sort of no problem. We in effect required changes to almost every major system on the boat – BIG problem. Don’t get us wrong, Malo builds a beautiful, strong, fast boat. The problem was that a lot of little things started to turn into a monstrous project – and from the start we didn’t want a project boat (if we did we would have considered spending a lot less money on a piece of “classic plastic” like an old CSY).
Not surprising all of these “little changes” began to turn into some serious money. The final element that really concerned us was the financial risk associated with buying a European boat in a foreign currency (in this case Swedish Krona). It is not that the idea of spending something other that US dollars is an unusual concept (Nancy has spent most of her career dealing with Yen, British Pounds and Swiss Francs), quite the opposite. The fact that the price of the boat could vary up or down 10-20% during the course of its construction was just plain beyond our tolerance for risk. With all the other potential risk factors piling up, two days before taking off for Sweden we pulled the plug on the Malo deal ostensibly putting the purchase on hold for a year until we could mitigate some of the risk factors. At the time, we still expected to purchase a Malo.
Patience is a virtue, especially when it comes to buying boats. We had introduced a pause in the process, giving us time to consider the next steps. Little did we know that the pause would allow opportunity to knock in a surprising way, proving the old saw “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation”