Jackie:
Be cautious!
Buying a boat in the US and using it in the US, if you are not a US national, is much more complicated than it appears on the surface of it! And it gets to be even more fun if as a non-US national you sail the boat FROM the US to some other national jurisdiction!
In the US, I believe, there are two kinds of "registration" for pleasure craft. One form is to 'DOCUMENT" the craft with the US Coast Guard. If you buy a boat that is so documented, or if you yourself have it so documented, you CANNOT
skipper it, AFAIK. Only US nationals can do that! Alternatively, a boat can be "REGISTERED" in any one of the states. Whether a given state will let you, as "an alien", register a boat there, I cannot say, and it might indeed vary from state to state.
If, per chance, you are a Canadian, you can certainly BUY a boat in the US or anywhere else in the world. However, to REGISTER it with the Canadian Ministry of Transport, or even licence it, you must
IMPORT it. Even if the boat never enters Canadian waters, you must
import it in the sense that you do the paper
work and pay the relevant import duty. I am not
a jour with the
current regulations. I recommend that you contact a
CUSTOMS BROKER to learn what amount of import duty and
taxes would be payable, lest you should find yourself facing an unpleasant surprise. Here in BC the
taxes are 12%, so in round terms if you pay the seller $40,000, you will owe the Federal and Provincial governments an additional $5,000.
Other jurisdictions throughout their world will have their own laws and
regulations, so do invest a little time and perhaps a few dollars in investigating what you as "an alien" will be faced with if
buying a boat in the US. Do contact the relevant authorities in the country whose passport you hold, as well as the US authorities, to learn about these things. Doing so will cost you next to nothing, and it may save you a great deal, even up to the loss of having your newly acquired boat confiscated!
All the best
TrentePieds