She's gone

Kukka has new owners. Our marina berth is empty.  Much more could be said about the sale process, which has messed with our minds and sliced up our hearts over the past few months, but I'll leave it at that. It's a brutal market, as Alex has more than once said to me, and having waded into it of our own volition, we've had to accept its terms. The important thing has been to keep a sense of perspective. Selling an expensive yacht in order to buy a bigger and more expensive yacht is an agony most of the world would gladly suffer. Not worth writing about.

So I haven't, much.

Kukka was of course surveyed before she was sold, and here she is on the slips in Balmain where she was poked and prodded by a fourth-generation Sydney shipwright who then anti-fouled her in anticipation of the next chapter in her life.

He pronounced her close to faultless, which wasn't telling us anything we didn't know.

Now that she's gone, we are free to fall in love with another boat and that makes for an entirely different story, one I'll be much happier to tell.  We're leaving in less than a fortnight to look at the boats on our short list. First stop, Barcelona. We're chasing dreams with names like White Wings and Ghost Train, Lily and Enki. Each has a seductive online profile and carries a price tag we think we can work with, but it's only by seeing and smelling and touching and doing all those other tangible and intangible things that you do when you encounter a new boat that we'll know. At least I'm hoping we'll know. It has to be love, doesn't it?