We officially “accepted the vessel” this week! What does that mean you ask? Well, after getting our survey results last Friday, we spent hours discussing the big to do list on the boat and all of the unknowns. On Monday, we finally agreed to throw out a lowball price to the owner. We weren’t sure she wasn’t going to just walk away from such a low offer but with all the work that needs to be done we weren’t ready to pay much more. We knew the owner was fairly motivated to sell, but her broker was was receiving lots of calls from other interested boaters. There just aren’t many trawlers available, especially in this price range. She countered on Tuesday and we accepted – she dropped our agreed on price by $30,000 – $45,000 lower than her original asking price! There is a long list of to dos and a few unknowns that make us very nervous but we can make many improvements with the price drop. We are very busy this week, talking with boatyards, lenders, insurance, the boat brokers, and a few others to settle on a close date – hopefully next week!
One of the most stressful things we had to do yesterday was make a final decision on a name and home port. Chad and I are terrible quick decision makers – it took us nearly 2 weeks to name Bebe! We have been thinking and brainstorming ideas for awhile for the boat but also didn’t want to name a boat that we might not buy. Getting too attached would have made negotiating the price more difficult! We thought about Island Gypsea after the boat we have now…but decided to listen to Julia and not use such a derogatory name. I really wanted a name with Sota in it – for Minnesota. Sota Pop, Sota Nice, Salty Sota…Chad liked Purple Pelican, Viking Ship, Free Spirit. After more discussion we came up with H2O Odyssey, Hewitt’s Odyssea, and settled on Blue Odyssey from Chaska Minnesota. We are both really happy with the final decision even tho Odyssey is a fairly common boat name…the blue makes us think of water and this is really an epic journey for us so it seems perfect!