LOCKDOWN PRINCESS

Former sailors Cindy and Ariel Poler decided to buy a motorboat which they could use as a second home in San Francisco, so how come they ended up buying a Princess F50 in Italy?

When our youngest son left for college last summer, my wife Cindy and I decided to sell our San Francisco home and move to our weekend place at Stinson Beach, 45 minutes north of the city. As lifetime sailors, kiters and surfers, we couldn’t wait to wake up to the sound of the ocean every day and be able to get on the water for every lunch break. We both have flexible occupations, me working with technology start-ups, Cindy doing online maths coaching for kids, so all we needed was to be able to spend a couple of days a week in San Francisco. The idea was to get a small apartment in the city that we could use as our operations base but it soon became clear that, given the local property market, finding a place we would be excited about at a reasonable price was next to impossible.

We then had a crazy idea: what about replacing the small sailboat we keep at the San Francisco Yacht Harbour with a motor boat, and use that as our base? The SF Harbour is a stunning place, in a great neighbourhood with amazing views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and the Palace of Fine Arts. The marina doesn’t allow liveaboards, but they do allow you to sleep aboard three days per week, which was more than enough for us. The cost of such a set-up would be an order of magnitude lower than that of a comparable apartment!

To lifetime sailors like us, the thought of buying a motor boat was blasphemy. We’ve owned, sailed and raced yachts of all types and sizes, from dinghies, such as Lasers and Optimists, to a 65-foot performance cruiser. A motor boat had never held any appeal to us, yet it soon became crystal clear that this would be the perfect solution for our current circumstances.