CARRI-CRAFT 57 Carri-Craft 57 FLOATING CONDO

This Carri-Craft houseboat is a huge project vessel both in terms of being a HUGE PROJECT and also being a HUGE VESSEL worth of floating real estate. This dual hull catamaran style boat has a very strong single piece cast hull with two pontoons (ammas) as part of the same hull. It is a huge interior space floating upon this one dual-sided hull. It would make a perfect floating residence or office or art studio in the Washington D.C./Baltimore Maryland area. That is the good news. The bad news is that it needs a ton of restoration work. In fact a more accurate description would be to call it in need of a complete new interior remodel.

Think of this boat as the floating equivalent to purchasing bare land to build a house upon. It has square footage but that is about all it has. The motors have significant rust and have not been used at all. The interior stinks of pet smell from the guy who lived on it before who had several small dogs on board and he wasnt the worlds greatest dog owner by any stretch. There are leaks and mold. The interior is generally just plain disgusting. You should expect to tear out the interior plywood flooring, the vinyl on the walls and also the ceiling headliner and put in a new plywood floor and paint or otherwise re-surface the interior walls and ceiling. Assume that none of the electronics or mechanicals work properly and if you find out otherwise then lucky for you, but I wouldnt expect anything to work from one glance at the condition of it.

You can look at the two other Carri-Craft 57s for sale on Yachtworld for ideas on what this one could look like once the interior is gutted and a new interior put in. The one in Key West I especially like the way they removed the loft and raised the ceiling into one large room with the pilot station forward which makes it really feel like a really spacious home. It is priced at $109,899. The other one in California has a nice enclosed canvas upper deck salon. It is for sale at $125,000. If you are handy you could easily do the remodel for around 20-30KK and save 60-70K or so over purchasing of of the fully restored sisterships. This project is basically the same as flipping a house that needs a deep re-model.

Before bidding please give me a ring to talk over plans for having the boat moved safely to a new location and whether you will need my help with that, which I am happy to assist with. That process is part and parcel of buying this boat. I will be happy to show you the vessel documents and payment is due within 48 hours after the auction according to the payment terms, but the transaction will be based upon a purchase contract requiring that the vessel be relocated before May 15th. Final USCG Documentation papers will be issued in the new owner's name only after arrangements are made to safely move the boat out of the current anchorage because that is a promise I have made to the local marina neighbors and property owners who do not like huge older boats left indefinitely parked in the local anchorage. This is a burden that comes with purchasing the boat but it also why this is an opportunity vessel that is available at fast sale auction price here on classifieds board. Please respect this and give me a call to discuss the details of your plans and for ideas on how to get the boat moved affordably if you want some consultation about that.

This boat could be hauled with a semi-truck perhaps but that would be very expensive. It needs to leave the anchorage where it is currently anchored on a triple anchor system and resting safely on a sand bar where it floats at high-tide and is sitting upon the sand at low-tide. But the boat must be moved from out of county waters before the end of April. Preferably it needs to be moved to a boatyard such as Herrington Harbor North in Deale Maryland or Gratitude Marina in Rock Hall, Maryland or to some other facility to have the bottom scraped and re-painted and to gut the interior and re-build it into the floating paradise on water that it could become.

But do not fool yourself into thinking that this is a little weekend project. Restoring this floating house will require some serious elbow grease and a lot of plywood and paint and other building materials. If you are comfortable with land-based house re-models this will be a familiar sort of project for you. It will be very similar to gutting a land house back to the walls and starting over with all new everything. But if you have never done a house re-model, consult with folks who have already done that to get an accurate idea of how much work you are getting yourself into on this one before placing your bid.

To move the boat locally during calm wind an outboard motor bracket could be bolted on the transom and put a 25 to 150 horsepower outboard motor on the back. To bring it to the anchorage we used only a small pontoon boat with an 8hp outboard motor believe it or not, and it moved it but pretty slowly and only in calm water. But I think a mounted 50hp or larger motor would move it fairly gracefully from one location to another during calm weather at 3 to 5 knots. If you want to go faster you would obviously need some larger outboard motors installed or to do the impossiblereplace or repair the inboards.

But if you just want a floating condo that you can move from place to place every once in a while but mostly keep in one spot I think a modest sized outboard motor would be just fine for carefully planned boat movements from one marina or anchorage to another.

I am happy to consult for free on getting this boat safely from its current anchorage to a boatyard or far removed anchorage where it is not bothering the view of any big fancy homes. With a TowBoat US or SeaTow annual membership you could also call and have the boat moved by a professional tow service for up to about 30 miles as a dock to dock tow. I will work with you to help facilitate getting the boat to a new home where you can give it as much love and attention as it will require to bring it back to life, but part and parcel of your commitment to purchase by placing a bid also comes the commitment to re-locate the boat from its current anchorage. Please do not bid if you have not yet thought through your options for where to move the boat to and how you wish to get it there.

This boat has a terrific and strong upper exterior deck that could easily support a rooftop canopy and deck chairs for an upper deck sort of experience on top of your residence. The interior is similar in size to a single wide mobile home.

If you want to invest in the floating real estate of a true Fixer-Upper project vessel of this scale and you want to transform it into a floating oasis upon the water, this could be a fantastic opportunity to buy your dream real-estate that becomes the place you design and build your future home within. It will be a ton of work, but for the right person with some handy skills and not afraid to invest some real effort, this could truly be transformed into an amazing floating home.

Please call before placing a bid as only folks will be allowed to bid who have discussed their hoeful plans with me and I am comfortable that they will be able to move the boat to a more long-term location within the time-frame allowed by the local officials. If you cannot come to physically take possession of the boat and have it moved before May 15th, I am willing to assist in overseeing that process and having the boat towed to a new location for an additional $500 fee for my efforts in coordinating that vessel move.

Includes roughly $800 worth of anchors,lines and chain and $1900 worth of solar panels ready to install.

Payment due within 24 hours after close of auction via Venmo or Cashier's Check deposit at Wells Fargo Bank with managers receipt as proof of payment or via Bank to Bank transfer. If you are the high bidder at the close of the auction please call me right after auction closes to discuss the details of the transaction & tell me what name/ address you want on the Bill of Sale. Will phone CLEAR OWNERSHIP PAPERS.

WHO YOU ARE BUYING FROM

We are serious blue water ocean sailors with thousands of miles and many years experience offshore and doing coastal cruising. It is our passion to help other people discover the sailing lifestyle, and especially the more serious cruising lifestyle.

If you want to call me and discuss your cruising or sailing plans and dreams and whether or not this boat might actually work to suit your needs I will be happy to speak with you and give you my honest opinion about the feasibility of your plans and whether this vessel might or might not work for you. Feel free to call and chat.

WILLIAM AT phone

IF A PHYSICAL INSPECTION IS A REQUIREMENT FOR YOU PRIOR TO MAKING PAYMENT, THEN INSPECTIONS SHOULD BE MADE PRIOR TO THE CLOSE OF THE AUCTION AND PRIOR TO PLACING YOUR BID. PAYMENT IS DUE IN FULL WITHIN 48 HOURS. SEE PAYMENT TERMS.

MOVING A BIG BOAT WITH A BOAT MOVER CAN BE VERY EXPENSIVE. OFTEN $4 OR MORE PER MILE. I AM HAPPY TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND THE OPTIONS IN THAT REGARD IF YOU WANT TO GIVE ME A CALL. By far the most affordable way to move a sailboat is by water, so please consider whether your location is accessible to move the boat by water or whether you will need to pay the higher cost of having it moved by truck and trailer. Also consider the time it will take to prepare for a voyage and whether your sailing skills or those of friends or other sailors you might find through the yacht crew websites are at the level necessary to make a safe voyage from the ocean where the boat is located to your home port. AND NOW IF YOU AREN'T YET TIRED OF READING A FEW INSIGHTS TO SHARE ABOUT BUYING BOATS AND CHOOSING THE RIGHT BOAT FOR GLOBAL CRUISING:

A little about what we do:

Our passion is to assist folks who are making a transition from day sailing or coastal cruising to becoming full-time live-aboard world cruisers of happily anchored live-aboard retirees. We also assist new sailors who are just getting into the sport of sailing by advising them on how to develop their skills and how to make plans to pursue the dream of cruising and world traveling full-time.

We have extensive contacts and resources for finding good world cruising boats at far below their fair market value, and occasionally we discover an amazing neglected vessel at a price that we know may enable a cruising family or a retired couple on fixed income the ability to pursue the dream of cruising without the sort of means and savings normally associated with pursuing this lifestyle.

In those cases, like this boat, we work to try and find a new home for a good below market value boat, with people who will fully restore the vessel, and hopefully use it for the serious cruising that the boat was designed for.

There are many aspects of life where experience really matters, but none so much as global cruising. When you are planning to take a small boat across vast oceans and visit foreign ports of call on your own terms you must truly learn to become Master's of your Own Destiny. It doesn't matter how wealthy you are or how talented you are at managing large organizations or companies with dozens of staff people.

When you are on a boat in the middle of the ocean, the choices you have made, the choices you will make and your own internal skills and the undeniable truth of how well or poorly you have planned for your expedition, are the factors that will determine whether your experiences become a positive adventure or a frightening (or even life threatening) catastrophe.

When you are looking at a boat parked peacefully at a dock or on jack stands at a boat yard, you will be tempted to judge it based on whether the lines are nice and whether it is pretty or ugly and whether it is new or old and well kept or run down.

The ocean however, operates according to immutable laws of physics. The ocean does not care whether it sinks a pretty boat or keeps an ugly one floating. It does not care whether you are a skilled sailor with dozens or years experience under your shade hat or whether you are an amateur on your first weekend pleasure cruise. You will be served exactly the same conditions of wind and waves whether you were born wealthy or if you were raised in a cave by baboons.

The only control you have over these situations is knowing when to sail and when not to sail, and you can prepare yourself so that when the wrong situation strikes, if it ever does, you are skilled and prepared to deal with it and have a vessel that is prepared to handle the same.

For people who are wanting to go cruising full-time, or who want to go from being pleasure sailors to competent seamen and seawomen, choosing the right boat is the first and sometimes ultimately most important decision of their nautical lives.

Of course you can always sell or trade a boat and then buy a different one, but still the choice of each boat will influence the experiences you have and it will determine in many ways the capabilities or limitations of what you can or can't do while you have that boat for your homeeven if it is only home for a few weekends here and there.

There are many nuances and subtleties to sailing, as well as to each individual vessel. A boat that may be just exactly perfect for one sailor or family of sailors, may be completely the wrong boat to suit another person's dreams.

By nature, boats require a lot of maintenance and upgrades, and if you are someone who wants all the possible bells and whistles, boating can be a very expensive occupation.

However, there are also ways to save a lot of money and still pursue the dream effectively and safely and create a new floating paradise for yourself. But each person or each couple's needs are different.

There is no such boat as a boat that is not a project boat.

A cruiser friend I know well (a relatively wealthy man at the time) purchased a brand new Beneteau 46 for his family to live on for years and to cruise the world on, the first thing he did to a brand new half million dollar boat was to spend another $27K on equipment upgrades, new electronics installations and custom modifications.

No boat, no matter how shiny and brand new, is exactly right for everyone's individual tastes and needs, and no boat comes straight from the factory completely ready to do anything other than Wednesday afternoon beer can races.

I often get asked by people who are shopping for a used boat to go cruising the world, Is this boat ready to cross the Atlantic? or Does it need anything before it is 'Ready to Sail.

The very nature of that question is a showcase of their naivety. Even if the answer were Yes, the boat is ready. (which would be impossible to have any boat ready unless you have spent thousands of dollars on a cruising chandlery and provisioning service ahead of time) the greater question is Are such ignorant sailors who need to ask such questions ready themselves?

Even if they had the absolutely perfect boat, prepared ahead of time by die-hard professionals to get it ready to cast off the lines and sail to points distant and exotic, would the sailors know where everything is at on the boat and how to operate those systems and how not to break them with ignorant mistakes or how to fix them once broken? And if they knew all those things, would the boat be equipped with the necessary repair tools and supplies as part of the process of getting it ready to sail?

So all these are big questions, and the only easy answer is that any sailor must become intimately familiar with their vessel prior to making long voyages beyond sight of land. The easiest way to become familiar with a boat so that it is not a stranger but rather a trusted old friend is to do a lot of weekend coastal cruising with it, while you work all the bugs out. Also, the more projects and upgrades you do yourself the more familiar you will be with how they work, how to maintain them and how to fix them again if anything every goes wrong. To depend on the expertise of professionals left behind in a port in a distant country you cleared out of months ago is only to invite future disaster...and its also much harder on the wallet.

So any time you can add to your own skills and knowledge of your own boat by doing your own work, or hiring a professional to help you do it yourself, you are preparing yourself for future success as a cruiser.

Any boat, even a brand new boat, will have things about it that you want to change or upgrade or move or install prior to making long voyages.

The better questions to ask are:

What is the proper amount of maintenance and upgrades that I will make to my vessel prior to setting sail?

How many things need to be changed or fixed before I leave the continental US?

How many projects will I work on, as little projects along the way, when I have a slow day at a boring anchorage and there are no cruiser parties to attend and no interesting conversations of the side channels of the VHF.

How many projects are absolutely vital to get accomplished before I begin actively using the boat as a full time residence and a floating RV that can sail to any country with a coastline?

How many projects do I want to tackle myself if it means I can save literally tens of thousands of dollars on the purchase price of a boat, and how much more ultimate value do I get for my money by buying a larger or more seaworthy boat with a few bigger projects to tackle than if I buy a smaller or more flimsy boat that is cleaned up nicer and has fewer problems to address. (Remember the ultimate cosmic law of boating even if you can't see any problems at all with a boat, and no projects needing doing, as soon as you own it and begin to sail it, you will start to find those quirks and bugs) So don't fool yourself into believing that you can simply buy a shiny new boat from a broker at full market value, or even by paying more than boat blue book value, to avoid ever having to make repairs or upgrades.

Any experienced sailor or boating professional other than someone selling fancy new boats will admit to you that there is no such boat other than a project boat. The only question is What are the projects and how much money will I save by doing them myself versus hiring someone else to complete them?

Every boat that I have ever bought or ever sold, which is now many dozens of them, had varying degrees of things needing to be improved about it. Even the brand new boats straight from the showroom floor or boat show sales dock will need bottom painting and new zincs and fuel cleansing treatments and oil changes and manifold and riser inspections within a matter or months of casual weekend use.

The longer any boat sits without the proper level of loving regular maintenance the faster it will deteriorate, and tiny 15 minute projects will turn into hour-long projects and hour-long projects will turn into day-long or week-long projects due to continuing neglect.

The quality of the build is also important. A cheap boat will have cheap boat problems, and it will have serious issues far faster and more frequently than a very well built boat from an esteemed yacht designer and builder even if the better boat looks worse initially.

In many ways you are better off to buy an older and more well regarded vessel in worse first impressions condition than to buy a shiny and well kept cheaper new boat. In the long run the better boat will cause far fewer headaches once you have it restored fully and you are taking care of it yourself, whereas the cheap but glossy boat may still look new and shiny for years, but begin having serious and costly problems that cannot be seen even while it still looks great in Facebook boat pictures.

Boating is like riding a horse or driving a high performance sports car. You always have to be involved in the life of your boat whether you use it frequently or not.

But this is not a bad thing, because it is part of the pride of ownership, and the regular maintenance and upkeep and small projects is what enables you to avoid the big ones or to at least know which big ones you need to do sooner and which ones can wait till later.

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As you will guess by now, I'm a bit of a philosopher sailor when it comes to helping folks find just the right boat to serve their needs.

I am currently writing a book on that very topic which will be called, The Seven Questions of Cruising (or) the Seven Questions you should ask yourself before buying a Boat. Here is a quick preview of the questions you should be trying o answer from the introduction to my new book.

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When you go to buy a boat, especially if it is your first boat, there are a lot of decisions to be made and hard choices to figure out.

Before you begin searching for the correct vessel to serve your needs, you need to first ask yourself, (and your cruising partners/ spouse etc) some important questions which will help you immensely in the quest to find the perfect small ship to suit your needs.

Question # 1- Where do you want to sail to (now and also possibly in the future)?

#2 Who might be going with you and/or who might want to visit you and stay on the boat with you once you get to that exotic foreign port (if global cruising is your goal) or that incredible weekend getaway spot (if weekend cruising is your thing).

#3 How much do you want to spend on this adventure called boating/sailing/?

Also, how much can you afford to spend if you happen to take a wrong turn with the adventure and need to spend more money to fix a problem or get yourself or your stalwart side-kick (your boat) out of trouble?

#4 How handy are you? (i.e. - Are you someone who naturally takes pride in your ability to figure it out yourself, or are you the person who would rather call an expert and pay them to solve whatever problem you are having?

#5 How much time do you have to save yourself money, because in sailing, as well as in life in general time often equals money.

#6 Are you a weekend warrior and/or charter sailor, or do you want to cruise full time?

#7 Do you care more about Getting There or more about Being There once you have arrived?

Standard Legal Disclaimer - Vessels are sold "As Is" with no warranty either express or implied. The Company listing this vessel for sale offers the details of this vessel in good faith but cannot guarantee or warrant the accuracy of this information nor warrant the condition of the vessel. A buyer should instruct his agents, or his surveyors, to investigate such details as the buyer desires validated. This vessel is offered subject to prior sale, price change, or withdrawal without notice.

PAYMENT TERMS -

Payment due within 48 hours after close of auction via Venmo or Cashier's Check with managers receipt as proof of payment at any Wells Fargo Bank. Paypal deposit due immediately after close of the auction. If you are the high bidder at the close of the auction please call me right after auction closes to discuss the details of the transaction & tell me what name/ address you want on the Bill of Sale. Will phone CLEAR OWNERSHIP PAPERS.