Shopping for a Catamaran
On arrival, we contacted boat brokers and arranged to view the available catamarans as soon as possible. The reason being, that on talking to boat brokers, we realised that there were not many catamarans around let alone catamarans for sale. We had a choice of three in Florida, one in the Bahamas and then there were a couple for sale in the Caribbean. After looking at two and being very disappointed at the presentation of the boats, let alone the price that they wanted for these vessels that were terribly neglected, we asked to have a look at “Duduza”, a 46ft Fountaine Pajot catamaran, three hours north of where we were living in Fort Lauderdale. “Duduza” was neglected and dirty but had a lot of new equipment on board and the vessel was in fairly good order. We made an offer quite a bit below the asking price and after some negotiation; the vendor accepted our second offer.
Buying a boat is not as simple as it is in Australia. First of all, liens can be placed against a boat if the owner has not settled his debts or has borrowed against it as security. Secondly, most boats are owned by companies. This is so that, when sued, only the company can be sued and not the individual owner/s. We were advised by the boat broker to contract a “Boat documentation company” to carry out searches on the vessel, arrange for the release and re-registration and take care of any customs documentation that was required because we were buying a foreign registered vessel (“Duduza” was registered in the British Virgin Islands) and we were registering her as an Australian owned and registered vessel. That worked out very well, as we had no idea of how to go about doing any of the above, except for the Australian registration, but as the Documentation company offered to take care of this all inclusive, then why not?
We also needed a postal address to receive confirmation for all of the above, the receipt of insurance policies and other documentation. The Documentation Company gave us the website address of a company who would allocate a mail bag at their address and set up an account on their website. For a small monthly fee, they accept mail on your behalf, list the details of the mail received, and forward it to another address when requested via their website. On setting this up for Mal and I, we also discovered that they would also open mail, scan it and place the scanned document on their website, accessible through your account of course. The result being that we could read our mail on line. We signed up and you can imagine how useful this has been, not only providing a residential address for us in the US but enabling us to access mail either on line or arrange for it to be forwarded wherever we are on our travels.
We hired a car after two weeks of being in Fort Lauderdale as taxiing and walking was not an efficient way to source the best places for marine purchases when the time came. In the end, we hired the car for four weeks and we could not have done without it. Mal became very confident driving on the other side of the road. I, however, did not become a very comfortable passenger on the other side of the car and I used my break (foot on the floor) all the time!
