Sail Further

Name the man standing in front of the "Further" bus.

When I finally pulled the trigger on buying a boat directly from Hallberg-Rassy I became an unwitting currency speculator. Here's what I learned in the process. Because Hallberg-Rassy is a Swedish company they price their boats in their home currency: Swedish Kronor (SEK). In early 2006 when I first started looking at HR's the SEK/USD exchange rate was 7.8, by the time I made my first payment it had fallen to 7.3, today in the cash market it's quoted at 6.35. Not using a hedge of some kind would have been disastrous. Here are the options I evaluated: 1. Pay the full price in advance at the current exchange rate. The downside: All HR boats are built-to-order. The lead time can be anywhere from 9-months to 2-years. Big opportunity cost, even if the cash is just held in a money market account during the build. 2. Convert the purchase price to SEK and hold it in a deposit account until the payments are scheduled. Most commercial banks don't...

A few days ago I ordered a C-map SD card for my Furuno chartplotter to cover my intended navigation area: Eastern Med. I ordered the m-em-m003: Mediterranean, Aegean, Black Sea and much to my surprise I received a card labelled m-em-m917. Apparently C-map has updated their product line from "mega-wide" to "mega-max" and the retailers haven't bothered to update their online catalogs (I use Waypoint out of Alameda, CA). If you're in the market make sure and get the new mega-maxes they cover the area of two mega-wides for the same price.