You may ask what EXPRESSTECHNICAL has anything to do with Sailing, let alone, Rangers.  Well, absolutely nothing.  The domain EXPRESSTECHNICAL was acquired many years ago while residing in Algonquin, IL, a suburb of Chicago.  My wife and I are both electrical engineers by trade and we used to use this domain for our S-corp web-site when we both consulted.  Suffice it to say, I haven't come up with a better domain that's available and honestly, can't see spending the money for another.

We now reside in San Jose after following a Job with Apple, Inc. as a hardware engineer for iPhone and since Apple keeps me considerably more busy than the many previous companies I've worked for, I have little time for moonlighting.   We also found that California is considerably less friendly to corporations with minimum annual francise taxes of $900, regardless of how much business you do.  So, after 7(?) years, we desolved our S-corp, Competitech, Inc.  But, I diverge.

We purchased Terrapin in October, 2006.  My wife gave me sailing lessons while living in Chicago many years ago.  I learned to sail on a J-22 on Lake Michigan over the course of two weekends.  Previously, I had sailed two separate times on smaller lakes on smaller dinghies.  My wife and I (mostly me) had talked about purchasing a boat for years while in Chicago but somehow living somewhere where it is only warm for 3 months out of the year didn't seem to make much sense.  We also had two children at the time (3 now) and really couldn't afford it anyway.  However, now we leave merely :45 from one of the premier sailing Mecca of the world...if we didn't own a boat here, where would we ever own a boat!

I started looking for a boat in April/May of 2005, mostly by viewing online sales sites, then by purchasing a few sailboat review books.  Finally, the following summer, we decided to start viewing sailboats.  Looking at primarily 30 foot boats, we looked at a San Juan 30, Islander 30, Ericson and a few others I can't remember.  After coming across a Ranger 33 for sale and following the reading of several positive reviews, we got pumped about seeing the Ranger 33.

Unfortunately, she was being sold through a broker, nonetheless we drove up to Alameda to see here.  She was clean.  Much cleaner than any other boat we saw in the same price range and we instantly fell in love.  It was one of the first sail boats we saw for which my wife didn't describe it as being a frat boy's dorm room.  Perhaps our expectations were set too low.  One sailboat I saw had it's engine in pieces, block and all, and the seller was trying to convince me that it was minimal work to rebuild. 

We placed a bid.  On September 24, 2006, I wrote a letter informing the Broker that I will be waiving the financing contingency and requested answering of 18 or so questions regarding previous maintenance of the boat and other generic information about the operation of various items.  I received no response to my questions.  Apparently, the Broker had assumed they had this newbie boat purchaser hook, line and sinker.  We scheduled a sea trial.

A week later we had set up a time to do a test sail with one of the broker's captains.  On October 1, 2006, we had our test sail which was relatively uneventful.   Unfortunately the wind was light for San Francisco and so we really didn't get to truly sail her to see what she could or could not do.

On October 2, 2006, I followed up with a letter denoting various issues we had found during the sea trial.  Among the issues noted were a rough, low-RPM idle, burned contact on shore-power cable (later found to be a symptom of a greater electrical failure), very "seasoned" sails, aged rigging and various non-working instruments.  I indicated that I would like to have the sales price adjusted.  I finally received a call from the Broker who indicated that seller was at rock-bottom on the price and that little could be done.

Still naive and in-love, we proceeded with getting an out of water survey.  The survey started above and below deck with the most troubling revelation having to do with some electrical problems.  Being an electrical engineer, that was one discipline that I was not afraid of, so I shrugged it off.  The upon completion, the surveyor gave me his findings and asked whether I wished to proceed with pulling the boat from the water.  That was, of course, the next level of commitment, having already committed to paying the surveyor some $300 and pulling the boat was going to be another $300.  I decided to proceed.

By this point, I was pretty pumped and positive I was going to buy the boat.  However, pulling the boat revealed some blistering, a problem that I had read a ton on.  My heart sunk.  This was not something I wanted to be part of.

A few days later, the printed survey came and after much deliberation, I wrote a letter indicating I would be backing out of the deal.  Not surprisingly, the Broker called and wanted to make a deal.  Perhaps I should have stood my ground but, with the additional cost reduction, she was such a good deal.