The boat is here!!

So we did it. We bit the bullet and got Chaparral's 250 SunCoast, after having owned two boats - one at a time, of course - a decade and a half ago.

We had great times with family and friends on board the "banana boat" - the yellow jalopy didn't really have a name - and then the Betty K. Now, with both of us staring at our retirement years in less than a decade, we want to relive those times. The wind in your hair. The chill atmosphere of Singapore's southern islands. And how wine and a beach-grilled burger seem to taste so much better on sand away from the madding crowd, and in the company of the people who matter to us.

I'll skip all the bits about the costs and the paperwork  - application forms and e-mail with the Marine & Port Authority and even Singtel -  and go straight to the day the boat became ready for us to inspect! It had arrived at Raffles Marina a couple of nights before in a convoy, complete with Cisco outriders, in the dead of night...

C couldn't make it on Inspection Day, so I drove to Raffles Marina in Singapore's far west on my own, met Eric of SGBoating. 

There it was, our boat! It was brought down from an upper rack to the washing bay, and I was provided a ladder onto which to clamber on board, and Eric did so too, to give me a quick tour of its features. Till now, we had only seen these features  in Chaparral's glossy brochure and online, as we cherry-picked the features we wanted, from choice of hull colour to the gadgets on board.

The ensuing paperwork and The Waiting in the three months after that had made our purchase of the boat seemed unreal. The boat first had first to be physically built halfway round the world to our specs and then loaded on the container ship ALM Crystal, which then made its way across the Atlantic from the US' Carolinian coast, into the Mediterranean Sea, down the Suez Canal, then across the Indian Ocean and down Straits of Malacca. We know the ALM Crystal's route because we tracked it online! 

But this was August 13, 2015. And the boat was finally here.

The boat, its outboard motor still under a white wrap, sits on rack B03 in
Raffles Marina. It is Chaparral's 2015  model, and ours is the first of this model in Singapore. 

Brought to ground level, in the washing bay.

Does one call this the console? I'm still thinking like a land-lubber. We got it fitted with GPS.

The Chaparral logo, stitched into the leather. Ooh, luxe!

This boat seats 12, and is about 25ft long.

At the bow is this hatch, below which is the anchor. 

At the stern, on either side of the outboard motor, is the swim platform.
Below that hatch is a ladder which flips out and can be lowered into the water. 
There is also a hose and shower head for rinsing off with fresh water from the boat's store.
 A nice-to-have option, we thought, so we went for it.