Chris and Valerie Mawdsley - Fountaine Pajot Astréa 42 Owners

Christopher Mawdsley: So I'm Christopher Mawdsley and I am married to... Valerie Mawdsley: Valerie Mawdsley. Christopher Mawdsley: And we bought our Astréa 42, Fountaine Pajot Astréa 42 from Atlantic Cruising Yachts, and we are very happy with that decision and with the choice of that sailboat. And we've chartered many times actually in the British Virgin Islands and also in Guadalupe. And we noticed a transition away from keelboats to catamarans in the industry. And we really took the plunge in 2018 when we met Josef Buxton of Atlantic Cruising Yachts and established a relationship at that time with Josef. He showed us around, I think it was the Isla 40 actually at that time that we looked at. And then we subsequently in the following April boat show, Josef met us and in fact had reached out to us prior to that boat show to reconnect and discuss boat ownership and boat ownership as a business. And so we met Josef at the 2019 spring boat show and took a look at an Astréa 42 at that boat show, fell in love with the boat, and really the relationship took off from there and we signed a contract actually in September of 2019 on a new Astréa 42. And so really that takes us from kind of cradle up until the current moment. We now have our Astréa 42 and she is in charter in the US Virgin Islands. Valerie Mawdsley: Our boat was built during COVID, so the problem was it was being delayed in the factory in France by two to three, four months. What Josef did was he found another boat, an Astréa 42, whose order was being canceled and he put us back into that slot, and so we were able to get our boat almost at the same time we had the original delivery date instead of way into the spring of 2021. So I want to make a call out for Josef for that because he was the one that called and said ACY, let's put their boat up in that empty space. So we really appreciated that. Well, we set it up as a Business Yacht Ownership because we wanted to not just ... We are not retired. We do not have time to go and spend on our boat. We don't have the resources right now to buy a big yacht like we did and not get some income from it. So the hook that got us into purchasing this through ACY and Architect Advisors is the fact that we could run it as a business. So that was what we wanted to do. We can do it for four or five years, chartering our boat out, and then at that point, we can make a decision whether we want to buy another one, whether we want to sell it, or whether we want to live on it. Christopher Mawdsley: And we didn't opt for everything. I think we were selective, but we got- Valerie Mawdsley: We didn't Christopher Mawdsley: We didn't. Valerie Mawdsley: I thought we did. Christopher Mawdsley: But we got a very well-appointed boat through that relationship with Josef and also Ken Krasko, who in the later phases of concluding the actual purchase and the final purchase order before we went to the build process, Ken Krasko was very informative in that aspect as well and told us some of the ups and downs, the ins and outs of what each system might imply in terms of long term ownership and maintenance. So we found the whole ACY team actually was very supportive throughout the entire process. Valerie Mawdsley: Lauren Miller, Kris Vereen, all the office staff during the time that we had ordered the boat, before we got the boat. Any time you have an event up here in Annapolis, we try to come to it. Support ACY.