I’m back with another episode in our saga to buy a catamaran to sail in the Caribbean. My story starts here with Part 1 and continued last week with Part 2.

Hurricane Irma had devastated many Caribbean islands; Tortola wasn’t unique. The island of Barbuda is no longer inhabited because of Irma, and there are major hotels on St. Thomas that are still under construction more than two years later.

On Tortola, there was no power anywhere, and very little fresh water. Many roads were blocked from trees that had been leveled. The boat we had intended to buy was on her side in the boatyard. Amazing Lady, our crew’s boat at the time, had also fared poorly. Even though she was in a secure hurricane hole, our crew lost most of their personal possessions on her. Sadly, that included Vanessa’s cookbooks as well as her enormous collection of handwritten recipes from her grandmother.

Our crew had managed to get a boat out of Tortola to Puerto Rico, where they could then fly to their home in the Dominican Republic. (That sentence contains an incredible story in itself.) By the time our crew got settled in DR, they had no old boat to return to and no new boat to work on, either. The situation for purchasing a boat was becoming clear, too. More than half the world’s catamarans had been in the BVI area at the time of Irma. Suddenly, many of those were out of commission! If you were crazy enough to still want a boat, you were going to have to start looking everywhere in the world.

We still wanted a boat. We took a deep breath, called a couple of brokers, and started another search.

Sometimes when I’m making a decision, natural barriers will pop up, and I’ll take it as an indication that God has a different path in mind. For some reason, neither Bill nor I ever thought that as we pursued this idea. In hindsight, I think sometimes you do have to choose the harder path. God doesn’t lay out easy paths for everything He intends for you to do. There are lessons to be learned by pushing through challenges. We could have easily walked away, but we stuck with it.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Maria started bearing down on the Caribbean, and her path looked like it included the Dominican Republic. Our crew called with what Roland called “a big ask,” but before he could get it out of his mouth I asked him how quickly they could get a plane to Atlanta. We picked them up the next night from the Atlanta airport, and it was our turn to play host.

They stayed with us for ten days. I think that was a little longer than any of us expected, but we were so glad to be their safe, stable spot after a truly terrifying two weeks. In hindsight, that stay was providential. We all talk now about how much we got to know each other. It was kind of nuts: we had only been their guests on a boat for seven days, and then had spent a few hours together after that. We shouldn’t really have felt as close as we did, but from the beginning we treated each other like family. They knew that as their future employers we cared far more about their welfare than pressing out an extra dollar of profit on the boat. We knew as our future employees they would always put our interests first and care for this (pretty big) asset in the best way possible. We had liked each other before the storms, but now we knew we could really count on each other.

I’m honestly not sure any of us counted on what would come next.

The reality of our crew’s new life was hitting them. Before Irma, we had agreed that they would work out their contract on their old boat, through the end of September, and then come on contract with us at the beginning of October, pretty much perfect timing for the new boat. But since the new boat was destroyed, our crew looked to be unemployed at a time when many crews had also lost their jobs.

That seemed untenable to us, and we didn’t want them to take a new position before we could get a boat. Instead, we asked them to keep the contract with us, at least for a couple of months while we figured out if we could even buy a different boat. They were invaluable advisors as we started a transcontinental search.

That search led us first to Fort Lauderdale and then to Spain. Going to Barcelona to look at boats is very high on the list of craziest things I’ve ever done! But such was the state of the boat market in the fall of 2017: no new inventory, a two-year lead time to order, and limited “pre-owned” inventory in Europe, with virtually none in the US.

Our broker found four boats that roughly met our criteria, and we spent three days driving up and down the Spanish and French coastlines to see those beauties. At the end of a long weekend, full of tapas and sangria, we had found our girl, a gorgeous 62-footer named “Princess Valentina.”

We made our offer. This was a deal with Brazilian owners for a boat in Spain between brokers in France and Great Britain. We, of course, were in the United States, but since our crew was South African we couldn’t flag the boat in the US but instead chose Jersey. All of this was dictated by British maritime law written in the 1700s.

As part of the negotiation, we had to move the boat from Barcelona to Mallorca. Mallorca, part of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, is the hub of all things maritime for the superyachts that cruise the Med. While we didn’t have a superyacht, we were able to take advantage of all the services they offer for inspections and repairs. And since our crew was under contract to us, they moved to Mallorca for the winter.

The deal took six solid weeks to work out. Bill made two more trips to Barcelona and Mallorca during November and December. We had anticipated spending New Year’s 2018 in Mallorca, celebrating the purchase of the boat with all the kids, but had to cancel only ten days ahead of time when the owner refused to take delivery on some paperwork. At that point, I did start wondering if we were even supposed to be doing this deal.

Finally, we took ownership on January 3, 2018. As luck would have it, the timing was incredibly advantageous to us—a Trump tax cut on capital purchases took effect on January 1 and applied to our boat. We could only laugh. If we had tried to take advantage of something like that we could have never made it happen!

We started making plans, and moved our celebratory trip to mid-February to coincide with our school’s Winter Break. Roland and Vanessa made themselves at home in Palma de Mallorca, first in an apartment and then on board the boat in a gorgeous little marina. By this time we had changed her name to “Callista” and had it painted on the side of the hull. This adventure was taking shape.

The plan was to sail her across the Atlantic and make the Caribbean in time for at least part of the 2018 season, beginning with our Spring Break in Antigua.

We bought our Winter Break plane tickets to Mallorca and looked forward to sailing on our own boat. But we were still a very long way from the Caribbean.

Come back next week for the conclusion of my tale.