We bought a Mainship 37 -- not the trawler version, the 1996 aft cabin version, the kind of boat I'd always make fun of as a tennis shoe or Clorox bottle on the water. On the other hand it's got acres of room, very, very comfortable, easy to move around topside, very well equipped in lots of ways (radar, chart plotter, the works), felt very good to me underway, excellent maintenance, and a great price. As for the timing, that's one of the 97 puzzle pieces we have to put together over the winter. After the launch in the spring I do have someone already hired to sail the boat out of the marina in Somerset, MA to the Bristol Marina in RI, where he'll hand me the keys and the mooring lines and we'll formally "take delivery" or take possession for the long trip & ship to South Dakota. On timing, I'm hoping to do this the last week in April and the first two weeks of May, but that could slide a little. I know catching a shipper making a deadhead or otherwise-empty run can help on price negotiations a lot, so we'll see. With just three weeks I might be overly optimistic to think we can run all the way from Newport to Buffalo. I don't want to run so hard that we have no fun. There's a lot we want to do on the way, and who knows when we might have a big boat of our own on the East Coast again. I do know we have to spend one day and night on the lower CT River around Essex, Deep River, Chester, and up to Haddam for sentimental reasons -- that's where I sailed when I was a teenager. Lots and lots of logistics, but I'll have plenty of time in December and January when the snow is howling outside the windows. One of the hardest parts may be finding a boatyard on the NY end that will take off the flybridge and load it for shipping for less than ten million dollars.
At this point I'm thinking 3-4 days goofing off around Newport, Nantucket, and that area, getting a feel for the new boat, outfitting, making sure we have current chart cards for the plotter, current flares, all that stuff. 4 days for Long Island Sound. 5 days up the Hudson, then 8-10 days for the Erie Canal. 300 gallon fuel tank, around $1200 to top it off -- YIKES! But mile for mile it may roughly be a wash with trucking I think. This partial run on the water, if we get to Buffalo, would cut about 450-500 miles off the road trip. When we shipped the last boat from Dallas it worked out to about $4.50 a mile over the road (not including any dismantling). I may be way off though, lots of careful research to do. A ton of planning and logistics to do between now and April/May, but great fun.
