If you wait a bit there might be a Mainship closer to you then New York. Consider the cost of going to NY for inspections and survey and the cost of shipping by land or water. Then add that to the price of the boat compared to a similar boat closer to you.
I'm not a Mainship fan so it's not a boat I would have any buy-don't buy advice about. But that's a totally subjective call. I didn't like the Beatles' music, either. But the above advice from YBG is good, I think, regardless of what kind of boat you're interested in. Particularly his comments on metal vs fiberglass.
Regarding the location of the boat you eventually buy and getting it to where you want it to be, something to consider is your experience level. I have no idea if the voyage around Florida is easy, average, or hard. Obviously there are a million variables that will determine how the trip goes and how long it takes. For someone like Don or Healhustler or psneeld to make that kind of a trip, it's probably somewhat routine in terms of knowing what a lot of the variables are and how to create Plans B, C, and D should the need arise.
But if one is far less experienced the smarter solution might be to truck the boat. We did that with the GB36 we bought in Alameda, CA and then needed to get to Bellingham, WA. While both of us had significant boating experience in terms of being in boats on the water, in my case both here and in Hawaii, neither of us was very familiar with GBs, particularly older ones, or running a boat like this in the open ocean up the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington.
So as much of an "adventure" bringing the boat up the coast might have been in some people's eyes (assuming we'd even had the time to do it) we elected to bring the boat north on the back of a truck. If nothing else our insurance company was a LOT happier with the boat on I-5 for two days instead of slogging up the coast out on the ocean with a couple of newbies at the helm. And our entry into cruising boat ownership was not accompanied by the stress of thinking about all the potential things that could go wrong on a northwest coast trip, from the weather to boat problems to the lack of safe havens to duck in to.
We briefly considered hiring a delivery skipper but at the time the cost of doing that was actually higher than the cost of trucking.
We did have a delivery voyage of sorts, taking the boat from the yard it was trucked to in Tacoma to our marina in Bellingham, an almost-two-day trip. And on the second day of that trip the coolant pump on the port engine began to leak and the engine gradually began to run hotter. We shut it down long before it actually overheated and had a short run across Bellingham Bay to our destination on one engine. But had this occurred during the run up the coast, it would have been a much more stressful situation, particularly to new boaters like us.
