Sale of the Zombie Princess

Well, it's official: the good ship Zombie Princess has a new owner.

The boat sale saga:

Interested party #1 -- The spider-bitten jailbird

Back in November, we had a cash buyer all lined up. We'd agreed on a price and were set to do paperwork. Then he vanished. Eventually, our broker learned that he had been arrested for being Drunk and Disorderly. He served his 30 days or whatever and then resurfaced, still interested in the ZP, before dropping away again, claiming to have been bitten by 18 brown recluse spiders who were living on his boat. Don't ask me why 18 reclusive spiders would all be living on one boat, or why they would all decide at the same time to be sociable enough to come out and bite him. If the jail sentence hadn't been enough to convince us he was a gen-u-ine Key West character, the spider story pretty much confirmed it! But he hung around the periphery right up until last week when we gave him one last chance to ante up. No deal.

Interested party #2 -- The reverse boatlift Cubano

As some of you may recall, back in 1980, more than 100,000 people left Cuba, with Fidel Castro's blessing, and arrived in the U.S., primarily in the Miami area. (Many of these turned out to be inmates of Cuba's prisons and mental hospitals -- sending them to America was Castro's solution to their overcrowding problems.) This became known as the Mariel Boatlift.

Well, evidently rumors have been flying for months among the Cuban population in Florida that Castro is dead. Some Cubans with means have been buying up boats on the cheap in preparation for a mass return to Cuba. I'm not sure what their goal is, reclaiming the whole country or just their own abandoned property, but whatever it is, they're planning to go.

One of these hopefuls became interested in the ZP in early December. He submitted a lowball offer, so our broker very kindly backed out of the deal, giving us her $2500 commission for extra negotiating room. Frank called the buyer directly to see what could be arranged. In short, NOTHING. The guy was exceptionally abrasive and pushy, wildly exaggerated the boat's faults, etc., and managed to completely alienate Frank. We decided not to sell to him unless we could do it with Vanessa running interference for us, negotations broke off, and the deal fell through.

Our only regret is that if we'd sold to the guy, we evidently would have been contacted by some U.S. government agency or another about bugging the ZP before the guy took possession. We don't have any strong feelings about the government in Cuba; it just would have been fun to imagine some poor agent listening to this guy spouting obnoxious things all the way from Key West to Havana.

Interested party #3 -- The baffled Brit

Just after Christmas, we struck a deal with a man from England who was shopping for a little boat on which to go cruising in the Caribbean. It looked very promising until he had the survey done. The surveyor pointed out that the compression post wasn't original, and the buyer got fidgety, even though replacing the compression post on a Hunter is a Very Good Thing. He ultimately decided against buying her, stating that it wasn't the survey that swayed him but a reconsideration of the to-do list for getting her ready to cruise. We were disappointed and frustrated -- he knew the to-do list before he put down his deposit! -- but what could we do?

Interested party #4 -- The bicycle repairman

With power at the boatyard about to be cut due to major construction, we were feeling pretty panicky about the boat still sitting there. Without power, an unattended boat in the water is in great danger of sinking, because the batteries go dead and the bilge pump doesn't run. Dreading the thought of having to go down and find her a new home, we began to reconsider the offer of a KW local who had been checking out the ZP for months and months. He was clearly a serious buyer, but he "had to have" seller financing.

I did a bunch of research about seller financing a boat. The consensus: Don't do it!

But we're doing it anyway.

It's a gamble, but Greg seems like a nice guy. He's very earnest when he talks about repaying us, and he doesn't have bad credit so much as no credit at all -- not even a department store card. We've tried to dot the i's and cross the t's on the loan paperwork, and I followed a bunch of advice about making it as easy as possible for the buyer to repay, but for us the bottom line is that (1) the boat is being tended to now, (2) somebody else is paying for her mooring and insurance now, and (3) there's a chance that we'll end up receiving a decent price for her.

We received the downpayment today, so the boat has actually shifted from the "expense" column to the "income" column. It's a major milestone.

The Bill of Sale goes out Monday, so we have reached the end of the tale of the s/v Zombie Princess.

The End?

Not really. This should conclude the Blog of the Zombie Princess, but then I'd have to start a whole new blog for family news, unschooling essays, and my occasional political opinion pieces, AND you all would have to update your Favorites. So, I've decided to continue blogging here even though the ZP is no more.

Does that make me the new Zombie Princess???

I guess I can live with that.

The Princess is dead. Long live the Princess.