Thanks Mustang, ..... OK now it appears to be about comfort as apposed to serious and competitive, I understand that. I don't think we should confuse budget with ones serious pursuit of the fickle and scaled finned. Yes those with deeper pockets can ride in more comfort , but then some of us get accustomed to getting bounced around with some restrictions by weather and tide. OK, I will give it a rest, and just say sometimes "age" has a way of slowing down the competitive and serious edge of our pursuit in the art of fishing, with more of a laid back attitude which has nothing to do with budgets, size or even determination .....I guess that would include me. Enjoy looking at all the "Mustangs Grady Sales" ...yes I would go bigger but.........for now my 2000008 is perfect.
A few things to note and then I guess it'll be an "agree to disagree type of situation"... it's not only about comfort, it's about being a more versatile boat in that you can fish with it, take the family out and have fun, hit up the sandbar with it, go cruising, shrimping, take it to SeaFair and so forth. With my previous 21' Arima, it was more of a dedicated fishing boat and not much more than that. To me, it's kind of like a 232 Gulfstream compared to a 228 Seafarer in that you can do just about anything with it, but the more you go up in size, the more the boat seems to focus on more serious fishing as opposed to the other things. Furthermore, the size of boat isn't always proportional to budget or money spent on said boat. Arima's have an almost cult like following out here in the Seattle area and because of that, I purchased it for $16.5k in June/July of 2017 in Maryland, owned it for four seasons and then sold it actually to a guy that drove up from California to buy it, for $27.5k. After four seasons of using the boat pretty hard, I still managed to walk away with over $10k in profit. When I bought my 228 Seafarer, also shockingly back in Maryland, they were asking $28k for it and I offered them $26.5k, which they accepted, so I actually still pocketed $1k and also upgraded to a boat that's 100x better in every way. The moral of the story is that again, I don't think that the size of the boat is the only indicator of pricing. At the time, it was late September/early October when I bought my 228 Seafarer and it had been on the lot for sale for a couple of weeks, so I think they were trying to move the boat along at that point.
I also think that the bigger takeaways here would be the location of the boat, being patient as I waited just over a year to find the right one, be diligent about searching every single day if you are serious and do really want a boat, etc. I ended up financing the boat for a couple of different reasons, but my monthly payment on the boat is less than $300 a month. If one is serious about boating or fishing and wants to own a boat, I think it's very doable to be able to afford one, especially if you're looking at a boat for less than $30k. And that's why I look back on the east coast when I do look for boats as they're usually about half the price or less than what you find them for out here in the Seattle area, or at least that's the experience I've had with my last three boats. I'm glad that your 208 Adventure is the perfect boat for you, I looked at several online and was even considering going that route a few times when there weren't many 228 Seafarer's to look at. I think at the end of the day that I would've been "content" with a 208 Adventure and that it would've worked out ok for me, but like you, I think my boat is perfect for my needs and I'm very much glad that I was patient and bought the exact boat that I wanted to get. Lastly, I wanted a slightly larger boat than my Arima, which unfortunately the 208 Adventure has a length of 20'4" whereas the 21' Arima was at 21'2" and I didn't want a new boat that was almost a foot shorter than my last one.
