I live a fairly simple life and that didn’t change much after I sold TechCrunch in 2010. I didn’t buy a new house or even a new car. The one thing I did splurge on was a boat.
Nothing too fancy or large. I live near Seattle and there’s a big boating culture up here. I found a small company that builds boats specifically for this area called Coastal Craft. I ordered it in 2011 and planned on writing about the experience after it was delivered.
I named her Buddy. It has state of the art electronics and a fairly new highly efficient propulsion system that the TechCrunch audience would be interested in.
There’s a whole story about the disaster of buying a new boat from this company that I’ll write about another day. Needless to say I’ll never be writing the glowing story I first intended. Instead it will be a cautionary tale.
Buying this boat was one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made, and the nightmare is only just starting. Today, though, I’m going to write about how the Department of Homeland Security seized that boat. Read on.
