Looks like you got a whole lot of sleek-looking boat for the money that'll probably clean up real nicely. It's hard to find
any 26Ms with asking prices much less than $20K, let alone less than $10K, though I suspect, asking prices aside, a lot of 26Ms actually end up selling in the teens, especially off-season or in more inland markets (though it's precisely those sweet-water-pampered barnacle-free trailer-to-lake-and-back-home sailers that you'd really want to find--the nautical equivalent of that old Caddy grandma only ever drove to church, temple, mosque or durga, as the case may be). That said, it seems to be a very "soft" market for boats overall, as witnessed by my own recent 26X purchase at a price you'd probably rather not hear about. Still, with a bit of luck, elbow grease, and judicious craigslist and eBay purchases, my hunch, judging from the pix, is that you're going to have just the vessel you want in no time for many
MANY "boat bucks" (
i.e., thousands) less than the norm. I list "luck" first, not so much because I suspect in the least that you're likely to discover first hand the old maxim of "the cheapest boat is often the most expensive," but rather drawing from my own experience. It seems that once I got my hands on mine, lots of stuff I needed to get it together just seemed to almost fall from the skies onto my lawn, where I did most of the work. One of my neighbors who was moving to Seattle kept putting out on the curb exactly the sort of crap I needed to outfit a comfy little pocket cruiser, and most stuff even in the correct black & white Mac 26X color scheme in keeping with Roger Macgregor's rather binary "
Korova Milk Bar At Sea" style vision: a few plastic multi-drawer boxes (like small light bureaus), a bunch of Rubbermaid storage bins, the big hanging sidewalls and screening from some sort tent gazebo thing to make binnacle covers and hatch screens out of for those buggy Cheasapeake backwaters--and all in a handy sailbag-style duffel, a great big rolling workbench thing he'd cobbled together really nicely from sturdy pallets and 4 by 4s. This arrived just in time for me to cut a stern bulkhead on it for the aft berth (since mine was missing) from a big 8 foot x 4 foot piece of what looks like some sort of very tough composite board with a bonded white finish that I found in the IKEA markdowns section for 9 bucks. It must be some kind of kitchen cabinetry or counter planking, not the usual "cardboardy" sawdust stuff you find in most of their other wares. Another of my neighbors put out two very nice big old Craftsman toolboxes, one single and a bigger triple drawer thing with a pop top, both stuffed full of Grampa's good stuff on the curb with a sign that read "scrap metal"...it even had a six-or-so foot length of decent galvanized chain in one of the boxes that's now rode on my spare anchor. Nowadays, with my boat in a nice mast-up state park storage lot, I charge up its batteries while I tinker with it using one of those little Harbor Freight generator sets that some guy tried to return as "broken," but which they wouldn't accept or even exchange without a receipt. In a mild fume, he just left it in the parking lot and drove off. I tossed it into the Durango without too much hope for it, but a few shots of carb cleaner and some fresh gas and it's still running just fine with a spare old black steel gate handle screwed onto it instead of its missing original plastic top carrying handle, which I think looks kind of smarmy. Sure, It's a fuming sputtery little 2-stroke, and while I might rather have a nice whisper-quiet 4-stroke Honda 2000i, all the same my batteries are both at 12.8V regardless, and it also happily ran the grinder that cut off my broken original trailer jack last weekend in favor of a nice shiny Harbor Freight swing-back type, and it didn't cost me a "boat buck" to get it done. So yeah: "luck"...I wish you lots of it.
with a voltage gauge...more useful
