A New Voyage Begins

My romance with Ayala started when I was already involved with another boat. I was living aboard Laelia at Westpoint Harbor in Redwood City. As I would walk to and from Laelia, I would pass Ayala and feel a powerful attraction to this beautiful lady. She is a Robert Perry design - a Tayana 37. She was built by builders who seem to think that they should build her like a wooden boat that just happened to have a fiberglass hull. She is replete with beautiful teak and mahogany on deck with a small cockpit (highly desirable for offshore work), a low trunk cabin (ditto), a Monitor wind vane, solar panels and a wind turbine. All in all, a very competent looking offshore cruising boat. She was a bit forlorn looking. I never did see her owner and it looked like she was not being kept up.

Time marches on. I left Westpoint Marina to go off on a circumnavigation. The gory details are documented in my blog at VoyageOfLaelia.BlogSpot.com. Suffice it to say that eight months later I returned to the San Francisco Bay with plans to swallow the anchor and sell Laelia. By the time I had her ready to sell and received an offer for her, I realized that I couldn't give up boat life. On the evening before Laelia's sea trial and survey, I was leafing through Latitude 38's classified ads and discovered that Ayala was for sale. I called her owner and found that he had already accepted an offer for her but if I wanted to take a look at her, she would be in a boatyard near Laelia.

As luck would have it, Ayala was scheduled to be hauled for her survey just ahead of Laelia. As we were waiting for our turn, Ayala's owner, Antonio, came up to me and said that the prospective buyer (a first time buyer) had gotten cold feet. Ayala had some maintenance issues that he didn't want to deal with. I made a tentative offer on the spot. Antonio made a generous offer (and a good sales move) to let me stay aboard as much as I wanted to evaluate her in the next few days.

I arranged for a survey and a sea trial. In the meantime, Laelia's prospective buyers accepted the survey and the deal was closed. I camped out on Ayala for the next few days and did my own survey while waiting for the formal survey. I found lots of small things - deferred maintenance items that had come about due to Antonio's hectic work schedule as well as a change of heart about the boat he wanted for his cruising boat. Most of the items that turned up were things I could take care of myself. I was willing to go back to work, if needed, to earn the money to take care of the rest.

The sea trial sealed the deal in my mind. We sailed from Alameda to a point about a mile outside the Golden Gate Bridge. The tide was going out and a fairly stiff 15 - 20 knot breeze was coming in making steep, lumpy seas. Ayala dealt with it all with no fuss. She stayed surprisingly dry on deck and was easily controllable on all points of sail.

The formal survey the next day showed pretty much what I expected. There were a items related to rot from leaks around chain plates and other fittings. Her batteries were in sad shape. She needed a thorough cleaning and a lot of paint and varnish.

I emailed Antonio a modified offer and practically held my breath until I got a reply. Antonio suggested we meet for breakfast the next morning and discuss the offer. We met and after a fairly short discussion, settled on a price. The next few hours were spent racing around Alameda to various offices to get the paperwork handled. By mid afternoon, I was the new owner of Ayala. I was so exhausted by the effort that I came back to the boat and crashed for several hours.

Now for the move in. I've been sort of camped out, living out of duffle bags and a backpack. I pulled things out and put them in their new homes. My daughter, Lane, will be here with a car tomorrow AM to rescue some more of my belongings from the storage bin where they languish. There will be a few more days of chaos while I get settled in, but already it is starting to feel like home.

I did some research on the meaning of the name Ayala and came up with the fact that it is a Hebrew word meaning doe or gazelle. It also is the name of the first Spanish explorer to find the San Francisco Bay. I like both of those associations so I am keeping the name but changing the hailing port from San Francisco to Alameda to make it possible to differentiate between the two boats.

As I am getting settled in, I will be looking at what comes next. The possibilities are many. Things will begin to solidify in the next week or so. Stay tuned...