What's better than one compass?

We looked at a 30' Newport sailboat in Ft. Lauderdale today. I'm no sailor, but as far as I can tell it floats, it has sails (in remarkably good shape), it's rigged right, the inboard engine starts up easy and sounds great while it runs, and there are some seriously badass winches for sheeting in the sails (Charlie used about seven adjectives to describe them... something to do with "reversible" and "self-tailing"). Charlie crawled all over it flipping switches and tugging on things, which all looked pretty thorough to me, and the verdict of his survey was that as far as the essentials go, it's all there and it all works.

The downside is that in addition to being full of all of the things that one wants in a boat, it is also full (like, seriously full) of all manner of accumulated crap that no one wants. The current owner, who is as strange and Russian as he could be, seems essentially to have been treating the boat as a floating storage unit for the past 8 months, leaving the inside in a state remarkably reminiscent of the far back corner of some old house's garage. We're talking everything from fishing poles (I think I counted five altogether) to coils of old rigging, boxes of rusted screws and empty cans of WD-40.

In summary - this boat is great, but it is dirty in a way that will require some serious sweat equity to get into live-aboard condition; however, since sweat equity accounts for the bulk of our wealth at this point, I think we very well may have found our boat. To quote Charlie (who has been talking more and faster today than I have ever seen in all our time together): "I'm seeing a lot of potential here." He's said it like seven times, so I think he really means it.

And, extra bonus: for some completely inexplicable reason, this boat has two compasses, so you can go double-north.