Ohana, the saga....get a drink it's long and convoluted!
05 March 2016
With regards our time in Sint Maarten, we don't feel like we wasted our money, as we had a month long holiday in the Caribbean and only paid for the first week in a room over on the French side. The next 3 weeks we were fortunate that with an introduction through the broker we met a pair of Canadian's who let us stay on their boat, since they had to go home early. It all started when we offered to help the broker fix an 'in furling main' problem (as we were going stir crazy in our room) on a boat he had sold this couple. We struggled for almost an hour on the boat while they had lunch at a nearby restaurant. In the end the broker asked the owners to come and help and with about another hour of tugging and fuss, with all 5 of us we finally got the main into the mast! 3/4 of the leach had folded over itself and jammed on the way in, making a real mess. You could say we bonded over that experience and as we told the couple about our trip and how handy Dave is... We struck a deal. We could stay on s/v ESTIVAL for the next 3 weeks if we wanted, if Dave agreed to fix a list of stuff, including replacing the hot water heater. Buying the parts and fixing these issues would be our "rent". Awesome. It didn't hurt that the boat was tied to the dock at Porto Cupecoy Marina, a gorgeous facility with many restaurants of all flavours and a well stocked grocery store and beautiful pool on site. We spent the first week going back and forth by dinghy, to the far side of the lagoon about 3NM each way every day, searching out the right parts, bouncing along against 2-3' waves, one day dealing with a snapped dinghy engine cord, which Dave had never had to figure out before....not so much fun. I had dealt with this before many years earlier a few times when I used a chainsaw, building log homes (in another life - for 6 summers). So after much trial and error, Dave fixed it and we finally made it to the store just as it was closing, only to buy the wrong hot water heater, we found out later! Yep back in the morning for the right one. The day before we were still communicating back and forth with the local insurance brokers who needed to acknowledge our boating experience in order to allow us to take out Estival. What they wanted was our Captains licence papers, which we don't have. I had sent in all our experience including the most recent Pacific crossing details....and still they weren't sold. Seriously! So I sent back a long letter describing the thousands of times Dave had been racing, always the one on the helm, in control of getting very close to other boats, never with a problem...how he had taken his boats in and out of slips each of those days.... And a breakdown of our most recent 18,000kms of boating....I mean seriously!!! They finally relented.
The day before Jim and Toni came I got winched up the mast to install new flag halyards to the bottom of the lower spreaders. While I was there I noticed a bunch of cotter pins were missing. And some of the key supporting parts were starting to move out of their correct positions, because of the missing cotter pins. Yikes! The broker called a fellow who came the next morning and fixed everything up, correctly, so now we were safe to go. The other thing we had to deal with was a leaky dinghy....one tube kept deflating.... Ah the charm of boating.....!
Before our friends arrived, we had had a week of fixing and were ready to have fun. 5minutes after I collected them at the airport we went to the Pink Iguana bar (a huge old tugboat) where Dave had parked and was watching the brokers big fancy dinghy. We had learned that in SM, if things aren't locked, they tend to walk away. We spent a few minutes catching up and celebrating seeing our friends, with a round of Margarita's to kick off the festivities. We were on a tight schedule, so took our 'go' cups and headed for the next stop, Lagoonies, to pick up the newly patched dinghy. We had to wait for it to cure a bit longer, so we each got a beverage there. We had bumped into a girl at Lagoonies earlier in the day who claimed to have lived onboard Ohana. While chatting with her she said she needed to call the Caretaker of Ohana, to plan to meet with him. When she explained about meeting us, he suggested meeting us later that day at the Sint Maarten Yacht Club. OK. So this was our next stop. We just got a table at the SMYC and some food ordered, when Dave noticed Ian, the Caretaker come in. We left Toni and Jim to fend for themselves for a few minutes while we exchanged notes on Ohana and our take on our experience, so far. I went back to spend time with our guests and Dave talked a bit more about Ian's take on the boat. It was really interesting to put another 'piece of the puzzle' together. All these people we had heard about and now we had met most of them, within a week of being on the island, without really trying very hard. A small island indeed!
We had 3 days to get some sailing in before my mom came, so we took off the next morning to do a quick circumnav of Sint Maarten. It was great although too short a time on the water after being land bound for the past 9 weeks....we could have relaxed on the hook a bit more. Once mom got there we had a rental car and the 5 of us toured the island, finding a few special spots, which were returned to with mom, once we were down to 3. Thank goodness our friends and mom came, as it really "made the trip" for us. Otherwise we would have brooded and stressed out the whole time. They really were invaluable to bounce things off of. Especially our friend Toni, who has had numerous real estate deals, some of which have been very difficult, including she and Jims most recent home purchase, which also took forever. It really helped to get some perspective! And some 'down time' away from the deal.
Our perspective on trying to buy Ohana goes like this....
We could have owned the boat months ago, and would have been happy to on one hand... as it is still Daves dream boat. The seller was never ready to actually let go of the dream she had, that her family would circumnavigate on it. She had been through hell, for years as her husband had defrauded her out of millions of "family money", then left her for another woman....brutal ! Dave found this out early on when he searched all the names relating to the deal, while we were in Tonga. So we had an idea why this lady was being so difficult. She had said partway along that the headsail was not included in the sale. A brand new one that had been part of reason we were interested in the boat. Initially we refused to pay extra for it, though the broker and the caretaker felt it was included in the sale and the seller was furious, accusing us of trying to rip her off..... New it would be $4000 or more...taxes/shipping. Then she had emailed to say she had never formally hired the broker, or accepted the offered price! This led the broker to engage his lawyer in crafting a letter to the seller, explaining that this was a legal deal and she was bound by it, since she had responded previously in an email to him to accept the offer. During this time we were not aware of the broker talking to his lawyer, so we emailed him, agreeing to pay an extra $1200 for it, as the survey had not listed it as part of the boat. An oversight on our part, and the brokers, as the broker had talked about it so much we were sure it was included. The other hiccup that came up along the way was that the seller (the mom) was not actually the owner, as she found out while we were in Australia, when she went to Texas to renew the Registration? The daughter was gifted the boat when she was 8 years old, shortly after the parents bought the boat, presumably to avoid paying tax?
This meant sending a new cheque, with the correct name on it, which took forever to show up on the Sint Maarten end. A 3-10 day guaranteed delivery through Australia posts fastest service...(small town meant no Fedex or DHL) which took a month to get into the brokers hands......which meant sending another cheque directly to the seller's house in the Toronto area. What a pain...not to mention $....and stress! All this time we were staying with Daves mom, who worries about everything, in a Huge way. There was no way we could tell her about Ohana, without increasing our stress load x10.... So we were sneaking around and trying to hide our real emotions we were struggling with, day to day. Thank goodness she is very hard of hearing! I was already DONE with this boat purchase, but Dave still had his heart set, so we carried on... Even though at times we were truly miserable over it.
We got to SM and were at the storage yard office our first morning on the ground and we were asking the office girl if she thought we would be able to go on the boat (since we had come all this way...) and she said "I will email her right now and we will find out". We and the broker looked at each other, wondering how this would be helpful...when the response came back right away! WTF? The seller responds to the storage yard THAT FAST? Turns out this was the norm. Apparently the seller checks her phone constantly. This was a real newsflash! That changed things right away! The seller had often taken weeks to respond to anything the broker sent her. I immediately realized that she was "done" with dealing through THIS MAN. Unfortunately the response was a resounding "No one is allowed on my boat or I will sue the yard!"
With the OK of the broker, I decided to try emailing her directly and she responded within the same day every time. We started to build a rapport and the broker would send something inflammatory. It wasn't long before I was giving him asking him not to contact her without me seeing it first and she was asking me to tell him not to contact her at all !!!!! Oh boy. The broker was getting frustrated, as he felt 'cut out of the deal', but realized that I was not going to wait for her to take weeks to respond to his emails. We didn't want to throw away too much money on rooms, when we should be on the boat, getting it fixed. We had family and friends coming! She had our Signed offer. And a cheque in her hand. So we waited and tried to work with the seller and our bank to try to figure out how to pay for the boat. She now she wanted a wire transfer instead of a cheque (which the bank wouldn't do, as we weren't there to sign for it). The owners mom wanted the $ to go to another person (supposedly a grandmother of the owner). We were not comfortable with this 3rd person option, so as our friends were arriving that day we took a "time out" to think about it and bounce all these details off our friends. During the first week we were there, we stumbled on a number of people who knew the boat and the owner and the resounding feeling people had after their dealings with her was the same frustrating, difficult experience we had been having. We learned many more things about the boat, some really good (the transmission had been replaced and the exhaust sized up to 3" to correspond with the new engine....). It sounded as though anyone who had worked on it or been owed money, had to fight to get it. (That all made sense in the end, as she was left with so little money, and had no financial support and an 8 year long legal battle with the father of the child....I expect money was tighter than it had ever been.)
We talked it out with Jim and Toni and then mostly stopped thinking about the boat purchase and explored for 3 days on s/v Estival and had fun. During this time Our banker was very nervous that this might be a shady deal, so we put a hold on the cheque and kind of zoned out for a bit and enjoyed the island our mom and friends visit.
In the very end the seller admitted that her daughter wanted to go to school in the states and needed financial assistance, which meant both of their accounts had been scrutinized and would continue to be, so at no time could they have this money come into their accounts....which I believed, but by then we had found new evidence of more boat damage (one day while I was with my mom who had come to visit, Dave went and sat under the boat). The first evening when we landed we asked the broker to show us the boat and we looked at it briefly in the near dark. We had stayed away since then, to prevent the yard from being sued. As it seemed we were nearing a deal and the seller was being more reasonable (but still not letting us on the boat) Dave went by one afternoon to see the boat himself and when he was looking at the hull, he thought he saw evidence of a grounding. He saw what he feels is the rudder and the P bracket are off by 2-3 degrees due to what he thinks is evidence of a grounding and another very experienced sailor he asked to look at it noticed the same thing. We had initially seen that that first evening that the boat had some cracks along the keel joint and some rust on the Stbd aft section. That was my first 'oh shit' moment. When Dave told me he found this other damage it was the second such moment for me and thankfully Dave realized this was a potential big problem as well. Yet he was still trying to convince himself and me that the boat was worth it.
So now there was just a few days left of the offer before it expired. But we really needed to think about how much more money this was going to take to fix and we still had mom there to spend the time with. During these last few days we spoke with the broker, bringing these issues to light and he sent off an inflammatory email to the sellers. I decided to reword those details into a different offer which had the sellers pay for the storage of approximately $4000 USD, up to the current date....she had insisted we start paying storage Aug 1, so thinking a deal was days away, we did. Then as the CDN $ value had gone down during the 6 months since this deal had been on the table by around $4000, the storage costing $4000, adding $8000 to our purchase price, along with this new damage discovered which would add gobs of money to the fix it price....making this no longer a good deal for CDN $$$$$. For a handy american, perhaps, but not for us so much.
During the time we had met the care taker of the boat and he vouched for us, she became agreeable and tried to work with us. She spilled all these details about the divorce, etc and after 6 months of feet dragging and generally being extremely difficult, she turned nice as pie and was doing anything and everything to make the deal happen. But by then we knew about the other damage and were trying to figure out how we could fix it. Not likely able to do it ourselves and how much would it cost at a yard? The seller was still on one hand trying to get us to pay for the storage since August! She hadn't replied to our last letter asking her to pay storage. She finally sent the signed "Offer to Purchase and Sale Agreement" 4 days after it expired! She still didn't address the storage or allow us to see the boat. Enough! The contract was expired. We were BOTH done!
Meanwhile we had been living beside the broker and incidentally met the couple who had paid for the survey on the boat that we used! Dave went to help catch them as they came into the dock a squally afternoon and they came by for a drink later. On his way home form their slip Dave offered dinner to a single guy down the dock, who was care taking an 80' Boatman. That night we had a rousing party on board as we all chatted and I kept the Margaritas flowing. There were 7 of us, all in and I doubt we were trying to be too quiet. The brokers ears were burning as he looked over (he told us this later) and saw us conferring with the couple who had tried to buy before us! There was major frustration all the way around.
We avoided the broker for a couple more days as we didn't trust ourselves. In our last conversation with him things had been tense, with us coming away with the feeling that we may have to fight to get our deposit back from him. He had said from a legal standpoint he wasn't sure who would be at fault, as he had 'refused payment' by having placed a hold on the cheque and she had refused paperwork.... Essentially trying to find a way to keep our deposit, I think. He had been through the the wringer, but he had also pointed out to us that deals are rarely this much problem.... As we know since we sold our boat with no broker in less than 10 days in Australia.