Extended sea trial on pre catamaran purchase

[goboatingnow]

Look the point has been made repeatedly , a private seller is not going to entertain this option end of story. Simply the insurance issues rules it out. Not to mention this is now a potential commercial charter

The op seems to think limiting him to buying ex charter boats simply because he can charter them before hand. This will shrink his choices to almost nothing and remove private owner boats from his vista which is quite silly.

The fact is you engage a professional surveyor precisely to identify any serious issues. That’s what he is there for.

Chartering a boat may never give you good feedback anyway. For example if it doesn’t rain you’ll never detect leaks. If there is only light winds you may never evaluate it’s heavier weather ability.

A two week holiday may teach you nothing , I can certainly discover all I need to know in a hour or two test sail.

I mean you come back from such a trip , what are going to say “
It didn’t sail ???” “ The light over the galley doesn’t work “ , I just don’t see what you’ll learn.

If it’s a production boat it will sail like all it’s sisters anyway. Why not go crewing on more boats and expand your experience


In the end there is always risk that’s what’s why a second hand boat is less then a new one.

I suggest this approach is merely a cover for someone who simply can’t evaluate a used boat , and seems to have a problem engaging a professional that can do so.

[mvweebles]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

That is exactly what I am saying and what is typical.

The better outfitted boat will often sell quicker but not for significantly more because as you indicate...buyers aren't trusting of add on equipment condition.

On a 5-year old boat with equipment factory-installed equipment or equipment that was professionally installed during commissioning? The equipment may not carry the value the owner may hope, but to say it has negligible incremental value is an over-generalization. On a 5-year old boat, electronics and such are likely to be modern/current versions (or close to it). To say that carries no/minimal value to a serious buyer is unrealistic.

Peter

[joelhemington]

Originally Posted by Piscis

Thank you guys for all your input!!!

Just to clarify a few things:



I do not limit to charter boats. However, a lot of boats i had a look at did come from charter. And i am most of the time in Thailand... so no extra flying there once i found a boat. If i would buy in the Med, the boat would need to go to Thailand anyway... Caribean is not an option at the time...



Same here. Most of the boats i am looking for comming out of charter or are still in charter. Hard to find private owned boats never beeing chartered in that range.



Maybe... but read my initial post. I do not want a free charter. If i would not buy the boat after that extended seatrial, i would need to pay the full amount of the pre agreed charter costs... no risk for the seller and no risk for me getting a lemon




Well, at least in SE Asia things seem to be a little different in the past 1,5 years. I talked to a couple of sellers /brookers and what you say does not reflect market situation there at the moment. However, you are surely right. This whole thing might not work for boats sold by owner or other private used boats.




Both statements are far of what i was talking about. In fact, as mentioned above, i am focusing more to charter boats - but not only. And i am having no problems getting a poorly fitted boat without solar, genset, watermaker, code 0, from charter.

To be honest, i would prefer a standard optioned boat just ready for charter without all that stuff. Reason is simple: I would have to pay premium for a 5-8 year old watermaker, A/C and genset. I would prefer to buy that options new (if i really want that stuff at all) and outfit the boat with then brand new equipment by myself... Sorry OT, but just because you mentioned that...

Anyway, i think i get the point. What i suggested is highly uncommon, if not impossible...

So i will see how the first charter company reacts when i knock at their door asking for something strange like that...


Thanks anyway!

John

You need to ask yourself, if the roles were reversed would you do this? What happens when the potential buyer just never comes back? Sounds like you need to approach this more conventionally with a very good and thorough survey. Up here, good surveyors can be very hard to come by without waiting several weeks.

[TPG]

As a seller I would have a very hard time with this; a lot can go wrong on a boat in 7-14 days with people unfamiliar with a boat. Also the insurance issue would be a no-go for me.

Do your own close inspection(s) and have a professional surveyor spend a day with it including haulout. While no boat is perfect this process works and should help you make a good decision.

[riki]

If a buyer comes with such kind of requirement, i would just pass over and wait for the next one. I understand that some people like to protect themselves, but i have no time to lose and this kind of buyer will always find excuses to try get a discount. So, not for me.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by mvweebles

On a 5-year old boat with equipment factory-installed equipment or equipment that was professionally installed during commissioning? The equipment may not carry the value the owner may hope, but to say it has negligible incremental value is an over-generalization. On a 5-year old boat, electronics and such are likely to be modern/current versions (or close to it). To say that carries no/minimal value to a serious buyer is unrealistic.

Peter

If it's top of the line equipment in perfect shape with a very professional installation...you might get 10% of what you paid back in a higher price after 5yrs. Of course, that assumes the buyer wants that water maker. If they don't want it, they aren't going to offer more for it.

Electronics are even worse. A year later and you no longer have the latest and greatest. 5yrs old is ancient...even if perfectly viable in real world use.

Add on equipment adds little to nothing in terms of sales price.

[Auspicious]

Originally Posted by Piscis

My question: Is it a possible and/or common procedure when buying a boat to ask for an extended bareboat sea trial of lets say 7-14 days? Just like a regular bareboat charter.

Hi John,

I'm going to take a run at this from a different direction.

As I write I am on a cat that just sold at anchor mid-delivery. I'm a very active delivery skipper and see a lot of surveys. They are uniformly poor. Sorry if that offends some of the surveyors I know are on CF. I've read hundreds of surveys and then sailed the boats. I've driven on dozens of sea trials and seen the shortfalls. I've rescued deals to the satisfaction of boat seller and buyer because the surveyor doesn't know what s/he is looking at. I have two pages of notes from the survey on this boat of shortfalls; problems not with the boat but with the survey - before I even stepped on the boat.

So I understand and support your motivation whether you are going to be able to achieve your goal or not.

Almost without exception, review of electronics in surveys are useless. No firmware dates, no chart provenance, no location of a/p fluxgate, superficial testing of a/p at sea trial. Certainly no SWR test for the VHF. Forget anything on HF/SSB or satellite or WiFi or cell booster. There are huge implications here. On the boat upon which I sit, there are four instruments that show battery voltage. The numbers reported are wildly different (2V from lowest to highest). Three of the four at the nav station. Not a peep in the survey. Still tracking that down. Autopilot never calibrated. Report says no AIS. Targets all around right there on the chartplotter. Marinetraffic reports transmission. If I never see "powers up and appears to work" again it will be too soon.

Electrical is almost as bad. Missed systems. Systems reported as good that don't work. On this boat, report says no inverter. Here I sit at anchor with my laptop plugged in typing. Inverter in starboard engine room big as life. How do you miss a big teal and gray box? Refrigeration reported as working. We are struggling to get down below 45F with two bags of ice in there. Surveyor probably just flipped on the breaker, listened for the compressor, and put his hand on the evaporator and called it a day. Useless. Did not test the aircon or the watermaker. Aircon doesn't cool or heat well and watermaker is inop. Can't even bother to plug a polarity tester into outlets. On this boat the survey reported the cooker as inop. The surveyor didn't read the label on the Xintex propane fume detector to understand how to turn it on.

How often do you see a surveyor with any tool in his/her hand except a mallet for hull sounding? "No disassembly." Bah! You can't unscrew an inspection plate? Peek into a tank? Four screws to take a cosmetic cover off inside a locker to actually look at something?

Surveyors who can't sail. Don't even know enough--rigging survey or not--to use binoculars to view the deadend of the main halyard?

American surveyors focused on ABYC surveying a CE boat? Forget it. Surveyor fails. Get an EU boat that's built to CE and been in the US for a few years? Forget it. Got a blue button the surveyors expects to be red or yellow? Ha!

The examples from this boat are just examples. I see the same shortfalls over and over again. Hundreds of times. The comments in this thread to "just get a good survey" make me laugh. Hard. I would get a survey myself but my expectations would be very low.

So I get your motivation John. I'm with you. I don't think you'll get an extended sea trial but I sure see the merits. IANAL. My thought, offered with respect, is a big(ish) escrow account for shortfalls that are not as presented in the listing for the boat.

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by Auspicious

Hi John,

I'm going to take a run at this from a different direction.

As I write I am on a cat that just sold at anchor mid-delivery. I'm a very active delivery skipper and see a lot of surveys. They are uniformly poor. Sorry if that offends some of the surveyors I know are on CF. I've read hundreds of surveys and then sailed the boats. I've driven on dozens of sea trials and seen the shortfalls. I've rescued deals to the satisfaction of boat seller and buyer because the surveyor doesn't know what s/he is looking at. I have two pages of notes from the survey on this boat of shortfalls; problems not with the boat but with the survey - before I even stepped on the boat.

........................

So I get your motivation John. I'm with you. I don't think you'll get an extended sea trial but I sure see the merits. IANAL. My thought, offered with respect, is a big(ish) escrow account for shortfalls that are not as presented in the listing for the boat.

You are basically describing something along the lines of System Acceptance Testing (SAT). I do some for work (not on boats). On a recent $15million (Contractor price) project, SAT was about $750k (part of Consultant supervision).

If you are buying a brand new super yacht for $100million, spending $1 million on a firm with experts in a variety of fields to set up the testing and then test everything, makes a lot of sense. It's a tiny portion of the cost and can avoid a lot of issues and costs down the road.

On a $200k used boat, spending $50k on a SAT (it doesn't scale well for lower prices) for a boat with a 5-10yr old $10k electronics package...doesn't make nearly as much financial sense...and then when you find it's an older firmware on the chart plotter, what are you going to do about it? The boat is sold as-is and it's not typically listed in the ad, so they didn't misrepresent anything. If you walk away, you are still out $30-40k for the testing.

Even with a proper SAT, you will see disclaimers and exemptions for things that are not practical to test. Also, the supplier prices typically go up because they know they will get dinged for every little issue and they need to cover that cost. If you put in an offer that has a crew of specialist surveyors having 2 weeks access to the boat to tear it apart...expect the seller to not be very interested in your offer.

[Auspicious]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

On a recent $15million (Contractor price) project, SAT was about $750k (part of Consultant supervision).

I don't think that scales. In my previous career I was project director for programs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I fully understand acceptance testing from both the customer and vendor side.

On this boat I spend one hour on the survey report. I spent a day on the boat for prep. We're one day into the delivery. At my hourly rate (my customer is paying day rate which is cheaper) for the time on systems that's around $1kUS. The issue is shortfall of surveyors, not expense.

I've come in behind surveyors (N.B. I am a naval architect and marine engineer but not a certified surveyor) and saved seven figure deals for a few hundred dollars.

[mvweebles]

Originally Posted by Auspicious

Hi John,



I'm going to take a run at this from a different direction.



As I write I am on a cat that just sold at anchor mid-delivery. I'm a very active delivery skipper and see a lot of surveys. They are uniformly poor. Sorry if that offends some of the surveyors I know are on CF. I've read hundreds of surveys and then sailed the boats. I've driven on dozens of sea trials and seen the shortfalls. I've rescued deals to the satisfaction of boat seller and buyer because the surveyor doesn't know what s/he is looking at. I have two pages of notes from the survey on this boat of shortfalls; problems not with the boat but with the survey - before I even stepped on the boat.



So I understand and support your motivation whether you are going to be able to achieve your goal or not.



Almost without exception, review of electronics in surveys are useless. No firmware dates, no chart provenance, no location of a/p fluxgate, superficial testing of a/p at sea trial. Certainly no SWR test for the VHF. Forget anything on HF/SSB or satellite or WiFi or cell booster. There are huge implications here. On the boat upon which I sit, there are four instruments that show battery voltage. The numbers reported are wildly different (2V from lowest to highest). Three of the four at the nav station. Not a peep in the survey. Still tracking that down. Autopilot never calibrated. Report says no AIS. Targets all around right there on the chartplotter. Marinetraffic reports transmission. If I never see "powers up and appears to work" again it will be too soon.



Electrical is almost as bad. Missed systems. Systems reported as good that don't work. On this boat, report says no inverter. Here I sit at anchor with my laptop plugged in typing. Inverter in starboard engine room big as life. How do you miss a big teal and gray box? Refrigeration reported as working. We are struggling to get down below 45F with two bags of ice in there. Surveyor probably just flipped on the breaker, listened for the compressor, and put his hand on the evaporator and called it a day. Useless. Did not test the aircon or the watermaker. Aircon doesn't cool or heat well and watermaker is inop. Can't even bother to plug a polarity tester into outlets. On this boat the survey reported the cooker as inop. The surveyor didn't read the label on the Xintex propane fume detector to understand how to turn it on.



How often do you see a surveyor with any tool in his/her hand except a mallet for hull sounding? "No disassembly." Bah! You can't unscrew an inspection plate? Peek into a tank? Four screws to take a cosmetic cover off inside a locker to actually look at something?



Surveyors who can't sail. Don't even know enough--rigging survey or not--to use binoculars to view the deadend of the main halyard?



American surveyors focused on ABYC surveying a CE boat? Forget it. Surveyor fails. Get an EU boat that's built to CE and been in the US for a few years? Forget it. Got a blue button the surveyors expects to be red or yellow? Ha!



The examples from this boat are just examples. I see the same shortfalls over and over again. Hundreds of times. The comments in this thread to "just get a good survey" make me laugh. Hard. I would get a survey myself but my expectations would be very low.



So I get your motivation John. I'm with you. I don't think you'll get an extended sea trial but I sure see the merits. IANAL. My thought, offered with respect, is a big(ish) escrow account for shortfalls that are not as presented in the listing for the boat.

Good post, and worthy of its own thread. Three years ago,, close friend purchased a 4-yr old $1.5m power cat. I'd guess that in his first 18-months of ownership, he spent well north of $100k to correct various issues with electronics, majority of which were likely from incomplete commissioning. And he's spent another small fortune on various issues with networked gear that make the boat's iPad controlled foundation seem effortless. No kidding, the boat has an entire 6-foot rack of hi-end consumer electronics in a well-ventilated cabinet (same type/style as seen in a data center) plus three various routers buried throughout the boat.

Problem is that every surveyor I've known primarily provide their services as a predicate for insurance. None of these faults effect the insurability of the boat. I can think of only one person whose can be hired to dig deeply into all systems - Steve D'Antonio. While ABYC I don't believe he's even a member of any of the accredited
surveyor societies. He is often flown to far flung locations to spend a week digging through larger yachts. Sometimes multiple times.

Auspicious, you've touched on an important point: higher end systems are increasingly common. The expense to correctly install and configure them can outstrip the purchase price. But expecting a 1-day survey to flag these types of issues is a tall order. Should a survey run a watermaker and test flow?

20 years ago, I was a full time delivery skipper, mostly new offshore capable trawler yachts that were heavily equipped. I didn't know it at the time, but looking back and reading Auspicious's post coupled with watching my friend, there's probably a decent business in doing practical boat evaluations. I used to do an extensive sea trial consult with tons of checkpoints that would pickup many of the issues such as poorly integrated electronics, but boats were not nearly as networked (iPad ready as they are today.

Circling back to the OP, an extended sea trial would surface additional issues. But who's to say the buyer is qualified to evaluate? Maybe the stuff works fine but he's unfamiliar and doesn't bother to read instructions. While I appreciate the sentiment to dog deeper, it really needs to be executed by professionals who at least feign non-biased opinions and possess a modicum of industry expertise.

Peter

[mvweebles]

Originally Posted by Auspicious

I don't think that scales. In my previous career I was project director for programs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I fully understand acceptance testing from both the customer and vendor side.



On this boat I spend one hour on the survey report. I spent a day on the boat for prep. We're one day into the delivery. At my hourly rate (my customer is paying day rate which is cheaper) for the time on systems that's around $1kUS. The issue is shortfall of surveyors, not expense.



I've come in behind surveyors (N.B. I am a naval architect and marine engineer but not a certified surveyor) and saved seven figure deals for a few hundred dollars.

I agree. The solution here is some form of deeper-dive survey. And from experience, an experienced delivery captain is likely in a good place to discover the issues (likely not the right person to correct all of them). Would take a full day on a medium sized boat so with travel and report writing, a few grand. Would likely be acceptable to a seller, and more productive to buyer. Would still need a traditional survey for insurance.

Peter

[valhalla360]

Originally Posted by Auspicious

I don't think that scales. In my previous career I was project director for programs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I fully understand acceptance testing from both the customer and vendor side.

On this boat I spend one hour on the survey report. I spent a day on the boat for prep. We're one day into the delivery. At my hourly rate (my customer is paying day rate which is cheaper) for the time on systems that's around $1kUS. The issue is shortfall of surveyors, not expense.

I've come in behind surveyors (N.B. I am a naval architect and marine engineer but not a certified surveyor) and saved seven figure deals for a few hundred dollars.

I do a lot of quality control work...I always joke with the guys who do the work how much easier to pick apart someone else's work than doing it yourself.

A proper SAT is very tedious and time consuming.

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by valhalla360

If it's top of the line equipment in perfect shape with a very professional installation...you might get 10% of what you paid back in a higher price after 5yrs. Of course, that assumes the buyer wants that water maker. If they don't want it, they aren't going to offer more for it.

Electronics are even worse. A year later and you no longer have the latest and greatest. 5yrs old is ancient...even if perfectly viable in real world use.

Add on equipment adds little to nothing in terms of sales price.

Exactly. I keep all my old functioning electronics and refit them when selling !!

[more]

Originally Posted by Piscis

OT, but....

So you are saying a 5 year old boat, outfitted with factory Watermaker, Generator, A/C and extra sails would not be significantly higer priced than the same boat without those options?
I mean, we are talking about 100-120.000 Euro here (Lagoon 40 pricelist from 2021, adding 25% VAT in Croatia or 7% in Thailand).

I dont think such an equipped boat would sell for only a "negligible" higher price...

when in Croatia buy lagoon 40 for charter VAT is 0% for that reason you sea on YachtWorld vat is not paid
also lagoon and all other catamarans in Croatia-Greece (i think also turkey) is cheaper 10-15% listed price in France. because size of market i think lot more expense in Asia/Australia-USA transport cost.
monohull 18-20% cheaper.
For you find charter boat and ask owner of charter your idea.,we here don't sale boat. If i have catamaran for sale 200k normally i accept your charter 2 weeks (normally i don't return this money on any situation maybe charge your deposit money if you make damage) and listen your offer if you say 199,9999999 k i say NO. What i sea now charter company only accept 100% asking price or if have multiple customers you must offer more 5-10-20% of asked price.

[sail sfbay]

Post #52 brings up some good points........and I will add get an engine, rigging electrical/electronics surveys in addition to marine survey if you want a thorough assessement of the boat prior to purchase.