To begin this blog about our Gulf 32, I suppose I should provide a bit of history about her and our time in her company. She is a 1988 vessel, and was commissioned and purchased new in Portland, Oregon. Her original owner put a considerable amount of money into outfitting her for ocean cruising, including a Lofrans Tigres windlass, roller furling, radar and many other necessaries for serious voyaging. From what I was told, however, she was barely used by this first owner, and instead lived a boring life tied to a dock somewhere near Hermiston, Oregon up the Columbia river. Her second owner, who we purchased her from, also lived in Oregon and kept Aeolus on the Columbia. He said he took her out the Columbia bar and up to Vancouver Island several times but that was about it.
We came along in June of 2006 and were thrilled to find a Gulf 32 right in our then home town. We had seen one once and fallen in love, and I had been looking everywhere for one and getting despondent about them all being in Florida or San Diego and far away from Oregon, when this one appeared on the market. After the usual extensive survey and evaluation process, we agreed on the price and my family took ownership.
I could tell right away that she had suffered from benign neglect, which on a sailboat beats the pieces out of abused neglect. Everything was oldish and original, but barely used. All the running rigging was ancient, the sails original, the standing rigging original and almost all routine maintenance had seemingly not been performed in some time. The diesel had 500 original hours on it, which fit with the engine condition and compression checks. In short, she needed a whole lot of maintenance, repair and updating but was otherwise in fine structural shape. The perfect sort of boat for a DIYer like me and a low budget family like mine to find.
We kept her in Portland while we lived there, and when we moved to our new home here on San Juan Island we brought her up north.
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