Jeremy,
I contemplated shipping a lovely Denman Marine built Bayraider 20 from New Zealand to California. To my surprise, it was vastly more expensive than the price of shipping one from the UK to California.
It seems New Zealand and Australia are in a class of their own for export shipping costs. I understand that this is because the cargo vessels that leave from that part of the world want to leave the bulk of their capacity to take on cargo coming out of Asia.
I ended up shipping a nice Bayraider from the UK as roll on/ roll off. It replaced a Salterns Tela that I shipped to California in a 20ft container 8 years earlier. The cost of the roll on /roll off shipping was about four times that of the container 8 years earlier.
Having said all of this, it is now clear to me that shipping costs have been unusually volatile in the last 4 years.
Bill,
Good luck finding that Swallow in the US. It seems they rarely come up for sale in the US as owners hang onto them, but keep looking. Some close friends of mine found Bayraider 20, wooden hull number 2, in Oregon. The owner had contacted Matt, and he called Jim and Ashley. Jim left from California for Oregon just a few hours after he heard of the boat and snagged it. Like mine, it now calls Tomales Bay home.
