In late January, we realized it had been a year since we left Apsaras in Panama. It was time to decide what to do with her. Since we are both still loving our jobs here in Seattle, the logical, albeit painful option is to sell her. But where? In Panama there isn’t much of a market, so the choice was to either have Dave sail her to Texas or Florida, or to ship her home to Seattle. Given that she still needs her generator repaired, our preference was to bring her home to Seattle where Dave could do the work rather than paying a boat yard to do it. So we started inquiring as to costs. We were quoted everything from $25,000 to $15,000 to bring her home from Panama aboard a freighter. We decided that at $15,000 it made sense to bring her home because we knew we would get at least that much more in sale price here in Seattle.
So we asked for the contract from a place called “Ship your car now” that also ships boats as their quote was the lowest at $15,000. When the contract arrived, we discovered the loading point was Gofio, Costa Rica. Yeah, only 1000 miles north, and on the Pacific side. It would take three weeks for Dave to get Apsaras there. And in those three weeks he could instead sail to Texas or Florida. The whole point of shipping her home was so that Dave didn’t have to use his entire years’ worth of vacation moving the boat. We pointed out that the quote we got was from Panama not Costa Rica. Alas the bottom line was that the company refused to honor the quote – because they had miss-quoted it and would be under water on it.
Back to the drawing board. We again asked for quotes. This time we got one for $21,000 with a real contract from a different company – Seven Seas. Though there were a number of things that needed to be negotiated. First the contract said that only manufacturer original equipment could be aboard during transit. Technically that would mean we would have to remove everything aboard – clothes, equipment, dingy, dingy engines, etc. The other thing that was odd was that technically the shipper could elect to skip the destination port of Victoria and deliver Apsaras to the next available port which was – get this – Singapore. The shipper insisted that it would be delivered to Victoria, to which we replied, “great! Then change the contract!” All that nonsense worked out, we went ahead and signed the agreement and sent the $6000 deposit.