Boat Search, Day III

5/26/07 –

I got up this morning and took a shower. I spoke with my grandpa over the phone about having him possibly come visit me within a week if I end up buying Richard’s boat. We both were getting excited and looking forward to it. Then I called Richard and asked him for copies of the three documents that he showed me yesterday. “I don’t know about that,” he said, “What do you need those for?” I explained to him that I wanted to take them to an attorney just to make sure that everything could be taken care of in a timely fashion. After a lot of uncertainty, he finally agreed to email me some Adobe Acrobat files with the documents in them as soon as he got home in a couple of hours.

Satisfied and excited about the prospect of getting a very nice boat, I checked out and went to the University of Miami campus to explore and use their library. I did some more research on boats and unsuccessfully tried to contact some more sellers. Since it is Memorial Day weekend, it is extraordinarily expensive to stay in a hotel so I went to Target and bought a tent and drove down to Larry and Penny Thompson campground, the same one that Bryce and I stayed at when we came down in January. There were far fewer RVs and far more tenters and the grass was about as high as my knees. I set up my new tent and realized that it was far bigger than I thought based upon the little mini show model that they had up in the store.

I called Richard to see why he hadn’t sent me the copies of the documents and also to schedule a sea trial for his boat. As soon as he realized that it was me calling, he sounded somewhat nervous and told me that he had decided to keep the boat after all. I was very shocked and disappointed. I asked him if he was sure, because I was very interested in it but he assured me that he just decided that he wanted to use her rather than sell her. I will probably never know why he suddenly changed his mind after being very eager to sell the boat the day before, but I will undoubtedly conjecture for some time to come.