In the beginning!

Sunset on the deck of  the Grampian

So how exactly did we get to where we are today? Well it's a long story, believe it or not we were both avid sailors. An unfortunate broaching incident lead to my wife developing a form of vertigo and here we are. We didn't give up on sailing right away though, we tried sailing flat on a trimaran. We bought a Newick designed Summersalt 26, it was fun and fast. Many times we would outrun the wind and the river banks would come up quickly. For all that speed and exhilaration you do have to sacrifice creature comforts. She sailed flat and fast, but we wanted to go cruising.

Our Grampian 26

With cruising in mind, we started searching for larger trimarans that would fit the cruising lifestyle. There wasn't much out there that really appealed to us. Then one winter while at a boat show, we had a look at some power cruisers just to see how the other half lived. From there we ended up with a small jet boat to putter around on the river with and mostly to take my daughter and her friends tubing. The jet boat was a lot of fun, but...it was noisy and really only handled well when you were at full throttle. For the kids, great, for us .... not so much. So we set off looking at power cruisers. The smaller ones were nice but didn't really feel right. We then started looking at larger boats, and there were a few in our price range that we found. We then found that we liked the aft cabin models which helped weed out lots of boats and our modest budget helped weed out many others. After spending countless hours searching through online adds, we came across two boats that really appealed to us.

Silverton 40 AC

We found a Silverton 40 Aft Cabin and a Sea Ray 410 Aft Cabin for sale and decided to make a road trip out of it. First stop was in Northern Ontario to have a look at the Silverton. It was nice, and the previous owner did sink some money into it with new decks, re-built carbs, and newer heads. There were some issues that we had with it though. The cabinet doors on the flybridge were rotten and falling off their hinges, the aft deck was covered with a canvas top that would need to be replaced and the interior space was not what we were hoping for.

We then headed down into Southern Ontario to see the Sea Ray and wow, we couldn't believe the amount of space that the Sea Ray had. For the most part it seemed to be in pretty good shape.

With a hard top over the aft deck, a radar arch to accommodate electronics, a clean interior that had loads of space, we were more than ready to move ahead with the purchase. After a survey and sea trial, we negotiated our offer and were the owners of a power cruiser which is now known as M.V. Tropical Horizons.