My first boat—the one I bought with my own money—was a 10-foot inflatable named Bomo which was short for “boat of my own.” That’s all I could afford at the time, but she provided hours of entertainment on weekends when nautical wanderlust exerted a particularly strong pull on my and my partner’s spirits. We would drive to different harbors, blow up the dink, and toss in a cooler and our cat to go browsing the goods tied to the docks. It was not the best idea to put an unhappy clawed animal into a rubber boat with a noisy outboard, but we were boat shopping, and it was only right for it to become a full family affair. And that’s how we found Indigo—sort of.
I should probably backup here. There were countless afternoons spent torturing kitty by sharing our dream with her, but we didn’t actually bump into our future boat directly on one of these outings. It was actually on charter that we took the first steps down the path to ownership.
Unable to fit on the dinghy dock anymore, we found ourselves on a mooring next to a man who invited us aboard to admire his tidy Irwin. Bob pointed out every detail on his cruiser down to the screws in the toe rail that lined up to point in the same direction. The boat was impeccable and for sale, but we didn’t feel she was the right fit. We enjoyed a cocktail with Bob and kept in touch.
Months later, on another excursion with our furry crew, we bumped into him again. He materialized from a deck overhead as we putted by on Bomo and waved us over. He had sold his sailboat and bought a behemoth Defever powerboat and once again, we were invited aboard to admire his fastidiousness. Standing on the flybridge, I peered over the side to check on kitty when I saw the perfect sailboat in the slip next door. She was a 48-foot center cockpit ketch and everything about her said, “Yes!” including the for sale sign.
We set a meeting with the broker the following week. Unfortunately, he wasn’t well versed in the elusive Celestial ketches of the 1980s, or any other cruising models for that matter. He disappeared below to turn on the stereo for “ambience” and then invited me down to check out the “kitchen.”
We didn’t make an offer, but I didn’t forget the boat. I kept tabs on her and learned that she was later sold to a Korean monk who was a sailing newbie. He reportedly outfitted her with wads of cash and then, along with a half dozen nuns, sailed her across the Pacific and back home.
Undaunted, I searched on, scouring listings on Yachtworld. One morning, I came upon another Celestial 48 but this time I was met with resistance from my other half. The reality of making a purchase that big had settled in. “Well, let’s just go see her,” I pleaded. “It’s my birthday, and that’s what I want to do.”
We met a lovely liveaboard couple that Saturday and for me, it was love at first sight. Although we were supposedly just window shopping, a few weeks later, we signed on the dotted line, and I had the best birthday ever.
Call it kismet or perseverance or whatever. After months of flitting about harbors in a random butterfly pattern with many unlikely events coming together, we had found the boat that changed our weekends and our lives.
It was not a direct path to boat ownership. We had bought an inflatable, met a guy with a boat who bought another boat, noticed his neighbor’s boat, and then wound up with another version of it from a neighboring harbor. It wasn’t exactly a linear trajectory, but months of dinghy cruises and that fateful charter still led us to exactly where we needed to be. And along the way, we enjoyed a lot of quality time out on the water. So don’t despair if the search process is taking awhile.
As for kitty? She wasn’t much happier on the big fiberglass boat than the small rubber one, but she could now hoard more toys, and at least boat shopping with that terrorizing outboard was finally over.
January/February 2026
