Buying a Boat in California

[bangkaboat]

After an exhaustive search, I finally found a boat in Newport Beach. While it is nothing like the boat I began searching for & was about $35k less than I'd planned to spend, it is one that I'm familiar with & a decent base for refitting, without a plethora of electronics that I prefer to choose myself. No big surprise, though, that is usually the way I end up!

What is noteworthy, however, is the surveyor & rigger I hired. Faced with a long list of surveyors in the area, I talked to some boating friends in the area & each gave a few suggestions, but all over-lapped on one name, John Bowman. John did a very thorough survey of the boat & gave me much ammo for renegotiation. He also recommended Richard D'Amico, from Independent Riggers, who was extremely thorough in his inspection, which also helped to bring the purchase price to a preferred level & brought forth issues that hadn't been noticed. In fact, Richard will most likely be the one I hire to re-rig the boat. I had wanted to make some modifications & he worked up a plan for the strongest, safest method to make the changes, then suggested a few more corrections.

I'm sure that there are a lot of good surveyors & rig inspectors out there, but my past experiences up & down the coast have been less than satisfactory, so I figured it was worth passing these names on.

As well, I should mention the selling broker, Bill Forsythe, who has made buying a boat in California a pretty straight-forward proposition for a non-citizen/non-resident. If I were looking for a buyer's broker, he'd be the one I'd call.

Mike