We started our search in Oregon. On the weekends, we would drive to the beach and look at as many boats as we could. During the weekdays, we exhausted the marinas in the Portland area. One memorable day we were introduced to an Islander Freeport 41 (IF41) in Portland and we both fell in love with her. A massive project boat- we went through our list and made our best guesses at the cost of fixing, adding to and repairing this old boat. We made an offer and got rejected and the boat was promptly taken off the market. We were crushed.
After that, the boats we looked at didn’t compare. We started looking outside of Oregon, first in California, but after a lot of research, realized it was not practical or affordable to buy a boat, live abaord, and work on your boat in California. We knew we wanted to spend time in the Sea of Cortez, so we started looking in Mexico. One morning while searching the internet, we couldn’t believe our eyes when we found Echo listed for sale in La Paz. We drooled over the photos together, realizing this boat was in WAY better condition than the boat we fell in love with in Portland. We knew from experience though, pictures can be deceiving. Unfortunately, Lauren was going off to work in BC for the summer and wouldn’t be able to fly down with Brian to look at it. He made the long trip by himself and spent an entire day on Echo, looking over everything and reporting back that this could be our new home. We were thrilled! Lauren had to wait for her working season to finish while Brian worked to offload things from his apartment and prepare for a big move. On Halloween 2017, with our Subaru absolutely stuffed to the gills, we started the drive south to Mexico. We drove to San Carlos, arriving late and thoroughly exhausted. We caught a plan the very next morning from Hermosillo to La Paz and Lauren saw Echo for the first time. Over the next 3 weeks in La Paz we had a complete survey done, in and out of the water, rig and sail inspection, lots of paperwork and she was ours!!!!
Adventures of SV Echo 