MOVING THE YACHT TO CLYDE MARINA
Where is Clyde Marina I hear you say.. Well its in Scotland on the West coast just south of the Clyde river estuary, the main base of Sunbird Yachts, who sell Beneteau yachts.
The end of the Boat Show was on Sunday and we were told that the moving truck would transport the yacht (by road) up to Clyde. David, who is our main contact at Sunbird, has assured us that the process will be okay and even offered the truck driver a bottle of Scotch to do a thorough job (of not damaging the yacht). Then the director of the yard emailed in response to our need for assurance, that he would keep us informed of the process. Meanwhile we will be planning a casual visit to Scotland to check out the area, yard and situation. It will be from this marina that we will hopefully start our expedition or adventure.
I should also mention that we are having some upgrades or retrofits done by the yard during this coming winter. The costs of the upgrades are included in our total price of the boat.
The upgrades will be:
- Installation of a 4G Radar system that will be coupled to the Simrad system
- Air conditioning reverse cycle system in three zones
- Two electric genoa winches
- A Bimini
- VHF AIS Symrad system
- 26 inch TV, DVD, MP3 system in saloon
- Washer dryer in aft port cabin
- Simrad wifi software to hook up to ipads etc.

We had emails and calls from other vendors that we had met at the show. Particularly Alex from Berthon. We explained to him that he had a very good chance of selling us the Oyster 53 if he had been available on the Monday when we had the decision dilema. We just needed more information about the 53 such as the type of operation and the environment it had been in, and the work which had been completed and therefore the work which would have to be done. For example a yacht of 10 years old definitely needs a refurbished standing rigging. In fact a complete replacement would be more appropriate. This typically costs up to 10k pounds. So buying old equipment needs careful analysis. We had been stung many times before buying old stuff and ending up with nasty surprises.
Anyway Alex just wished us luck etc and I suppose will pursue offers given by other prospective purchasers.