Making the commitment

After our tour of UK boat builders, which took us on a journey of some 2,000 miles over a few weekends, we had refined our ideas and the boat layout plus learnt a great deal from all the people we visited. In the end we asked 6 builders to quote and all we could do was sit and wait to see if our dream could become a reality within our budget.

The first quote came in, we opened it with baited breath - AAAGH £865,000!!! OK, I know I've got expensive taste but I didn't think it was that expensive!! A quick phone call to the builder confirmed that there had been a typographical mistake - phew. Once all the quotes were in we had a price range from roughly £65,000 to £85,000 and a potential spread of delivery dates from May 2004 to January 2005. What to do?

It really came down to 3 builders - Crown, Barry Hawkins and Darren Aldridge. Both Crown and Darren had been incredibly helpful to us - willing to spend a considerable amount of time with us and to discuss some of our more way-out ideas, coming up with alternatives which would help us achieve what we were after. On our first visit to the Barry Hawkins works, they had been helpful but on our return visit for a more detailed discussion we didn't get the same sort of feeling - maybe we got them on an off day.

After much deliberation we finally decided to go with Darren Aldridge - we had been impressed by the work he'd done on Whisper, he could offer us an earlier build slot, the boat would be built around the Birmingham area (rather than in Manchester if we went with Crown) so we would be able to visit more often PLUS he is 6 foot 4 inches tall and headroom is important to us. On the downside, we would be Darren's first custom built boat. Decision made, we took a trip up to see Darren at his home with yet another set of plans and he worked hard with us to refine the designs and ideas yet further - we left him with a deposit and a delivery date of September 2004.

We thought that we had done all the footwork we needed and would basically sit back until September 2004 when our beautiful new boat would be delivered - little did we know how much more input we would have!!

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