it's frustrating trying to establish contact with sellers for listings online: 1. there may be no response. 2. or i'm informed "it's just been sold."

I sent an inquiry about 1 boat recently, got a short reply back by email, "call me at...", so i called, and the guy it turns out is a dealer who received 1 of my very many inquiries, but doesnt know which one, so we start from scratch, what am i looking for, etc. So yes he's got one, $119k. Well thats more than i was thinking.

Dealers dont want to 'deal' with a mere $30k boat, they're looking for the big sale. Indeed i'm wondering if some of the ads for cheap boats (which then turn out to be "just sold") are just to suck me in, bait & switch.

Maybe craigslist a better option?

yet more boat possibilities:

• olympic 23
• another olympic 23
• Luhrs 30 This one's exciting, but they hardly say or show re: the engine, which is weird.

here are the 3 principal boats i'm thinking of now...

C-Dory 22

Bayliner 2359

Bayliner 2959

My good and knowledgeable friend Lee recommends the first one, better made, better re-sale value. But, UPDATE: damn, they've sold it.

Here's the boat of my dreams, but too big for me to handle alone.

My Channel Islands sails, i'd forgotten about these stories...

Here's a map of fuel stops i know of along the way.

Of course there may be more. But 1 of the critical factors is i need a boat that can make it thru the longest gap. Which i figure to be very at least 140 miles. So fig ~200miles. So to figure THAT, i need to know the gas mileage the thing gets.

Which brings up the subject of engines.

On my previous long sailing voyages, it was by sailboat.

For Baja & for Maine to Florida, i had a little 10HP outboard.

Inexperienced in Baja, i had a 5-gallon can + a couple extra gallons in a plastic tank.

Very quickly i realized that would not do at all. The wind blew constantly in exactly the opposite direction i wanted to go.

So along the way i added supplemental capacity of ~40gal in 4 big plastic jugs.

Engine-reliability-wise: Baja: Within just a couple days of the end, the engine started behaving very poorly. I suspected the fuel pump. So i disassembled the fuel pump, and as i removed the cover: PING, the innards shot spring-driven into the ocean. Dang. So i hoisted the tank up atop the cabin, the fuel gravity-fed to the engine, and i completed the trip, with dolphin escort.

East-coast: i had 2 problems: 1)Due to ubiquitous lobster traps, i kept hitting their buoy lines, this finally broke the shear-pin from prop to motor. [Shear-pin is there for precisely that reason, it prevents damage to motor innards.] Limping to Providence, Rhode Island, i hauled the motor ashore for repair. 2)The starter-pull-cord broke in ~North Carolina, which i repaired (laboriously) myself.

For the Channel Islands of southern California, i had a better (30' Columbia) sailboat, with an inboard, but the trips were perhaps at most 4days at a time so fuel was less a problem.

For this Alaska trip, as i said, i want a power-boat, PREFerably with *multi*-*out*board motors: This, so if there's some big problem:

• If 1 fails, i have a backup.
• i can CARRY the engine to who-knows-where for repair.