The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

How Not To Buy a Cruising Boat

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When you have owned and sailed boats for as long as I have, it’s easy to forget what a minefield the marine industry really is:

  • Incompetent, rapacious boatyards.
  • Brokers who make used car salesmen look like saints.
  • Surveyors who actually facilitate ripping off the buyer, instead of protecting them.
  • Rampant conflict of interest at every turn.
  • New boats that are totally inappropriate for the tasks they are sold for.
  • Gear specifications that are marketing-driven fantasies.

The list goes on and on.

It’s so bad that I would venture to guess that the vast majority of those who have bought an offshore boat have been badly screwed at least once—I know I have.

There are many reasons for this deplorable state of affairs but two main contributors are:

Not Telling

We all have a very human desire to hide that we have bought a boat, piece of gear or service that did not meet the claims made for it.

For example, when we published the story of the $55,000 we lost on a mast that didn’t meet our written specification and was uninsurable, at least half a dozen people wrote to us to relate their similar experiences—pity they waited to bare their souls until after we were out the price of a nice new car.

By the way, Jeff and Karen Siegel, who have already dramatically improved marinas with their crowd review site Active Captain, are, as I understand it, working on bringing the same crowd-based scrutiny to other areas of the marine industry—something we should all support.

Confusing Boats With Cars

For most of us, our only experience of buying large capital items before purchasing our first boat is a car. And, while I know there are plenty of horror stories, by and large cars actually work pretty well, even older second-hand ones, at least when compared to boats.

This car experience programs us with a set of expectations that we tend to apply to boats:

  • That a boat, new or used, can be bought and then sailed and cruised without the expenditure of tens, often hundred of thousands of additional dollars, pounds or Euros, and months, often years, of frustration and work.
  • Assuming that when we pay a boat yard to install a new piece of gear or fix something, that said work might even be successful more than a third of the time.

But the sad fact is that acting on expectations like this around boats, and particularly offshore boats, will often lead to disaster, although there are a few shining exceptions.

What to Do?

This situation should not continue. Here at AAC we are trying hard with the Adventure 40 project to develop a boat that will break the terrible cycle of broken dreams.

And we try to be honest about the huge mistakes we have made, like our first offshore boat.

Allies in The Fight

But on our best and most honest days we have hardly scratched the surface of raw confession compared to Deb and TJ Akey, authors of How Not To Buy a Cruising Boat.

While much of the book is full of standard technical advice—most of which we agree with, some of which we don’t—the real payoff is in the chapters where the authors bare their souls and tell all about how two intelligent people with deep mechanical and engineering experience (aviation, cars, and motorbikes) got simply screwed to the wall in their quest to retire to a live-aboard cruising boat.

And what makes the story even sadder is that Deb and TJ did most things right:

  • Read and researched a huge amount.
  • Bought and learned on a small starter boat.
  • Took some good sailing school courses.
  • Sailed offshore with John Kretschmer.

And still they bought the wrong boat for their needs, endured a brutal refit, and spent a boatload of money that they shouldn’t have needed to.

There is one piece of great news in all of this: Deb and AJ are finally out there cruising.

We recommend reading this book if you are thinking about becoming a voyager or coastal cruiser. We even stick by this recommendation for you experienced boat owners who have been on the water from childhood (like me).

And if you are contemplating buying an old boat with a view to refitting it, this book becomes compulsory reading.

Further Reading

Boat Design/Selection Child Topics:

More Articles From Boat Design/Selection:

  1. Colin & Louise are Buying a New Sailboat
  2. Q&A—Sailboat Performance, When The Numbers Fail
  3. Talking About Buying Fibreglass Boats With Andy Schell
  4. US Sailboat Show Report—Boats
  5. Some Thoughts On Smaller Older Cruising Boats
  6. Wow, Buying an Offshore Sailboat is Really Hard
  7. Hull Design Torture Test
  8. Of Dishwashers and Yacht Designers
  9. Which Is The Best Boat For Offshore Cruising?
  10. Meeting Up With Steve and Linda Dashew
  11. Cruising On Less Than $15,000/Year, Including The Boat—What It Takes
  12. How Not To Buy a Cruising Boat
  13. Where Do We Go From Here?
  14. The Boat Design Spiral
  15. Spade Rudders—Ready for Sea?
  16. Trade Offs in Yacht Design
  17. We Live in Rapidly Changing Times
  18. Long Thin Boats Are Cool
  19. Beauty and The Beast
  20. Q&A: What About Ferro-Cement Boats?
  21. Thinking About a Steel Boat?
  22. Your Boat Should Forgive You
  23. New Versus Old
  24. Rudder Options, Staying In Control
  25. “Vagabond”—An Extraordinary Polar Yacht
  26. Learning The Hard Way
  27. The Real Story On The MacGregor 65
  28. An Engineless Junk Rigged Dory—Another Way To Get Out There
  29. S/V “Polaris”, Built For The Arctic
  30. Boats We Like: The Saga 43
  31. Designers of “Morgan’s Cloud” Have A New Website
  32. Q&A: Interior Layout And Boat Selection
  33. A Rugged Boat For The High Latitudes
  34. Q&A: Homebuilding A Boat
  35. Q&A: Sailboat Stability Contradiction
  36. Are Spade Rudders Suitable For Ocean Crossings?
  37. There’s No Excuse For Pounding
  38. Q&A: Tips On Buying A Used Boat For The High Latitudes
  39. Used Boat For Trans-Atlantic On A Budget
  40. QA&: Is A Macgregor 26M Suitable For A Trans-Atlantic?
  41. Q&A: Used Colin Archer Design Sailboat
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ChrisW

Eleven years ago, there was a book celebrating the “Wisdom of the Crowd.” Our knowledge management team examined the concepts described therein from an intelligence collection and processing context — what do people know that perhaps they don’t realize they know? This was part of a post 9/11 assessment.

One thing we extracted was wisdom declines inversely with desire. The more we want an outcome, the less like we are to approach it wisely — well, DUH. The second was so many things are regulated these days that we subconsciously apply a “somebody is looking out for me” bias to our emotionally degraded wisdom.

Added to that, buying and outfitting a cruising boat — even if it is going well — has the stress content of buying a house, embracing a new partner and an impending job change — the sum of which from the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale get you roughly half way to a major illness! If your life is already complicated you might want to deal with those complications before adding these.

For the majority, equipping for offshore cruising is an emotionally burdened hike across a knowledge bog. To cross that bog with muck only to the knees one has to be ready and able to walk away from the whole thing without a backward glance.

One thing required is to push ones self to utility thinking rather than romantic thinking. This is hard when the enterprise is fundamentally romantic, and it’s why cruisers to be are so easily exploited, the romantic part of their brain is involved in the decision making. Another thing required is the recognition that the tiny market called offshore cruising is the wild, wild west and P. T. Barnum’s attitude toward customers is too common for comfort. There’s a reason for taking a magnet when buying stainless.

The second thing we found was Crowd Wisdom lives shoulder to shoulder with Herd Mentality. After a while, individual, highly specific knowledge degrades into misleading statistics. We belong to a group that keeps statistics on cruising equipage and behavior. This data base is shared freely with the membership provided they contribute to the data pool. When I read through it I see Herd Mentality (and some very old data in places where technologies have changed significantly).

Because 83% of the Herd uses anchor X or radio Y, the probability someone new to cruising will use X and Y is increased and ultimately the percentage goes up — independent of the utility of the items in the new cruisers context. (Maybe this belonged in the comments on the last post).

The anecdotes that accompany the statistics are at least equally valuable — common anecdotes being, it came with the boat, but we haven’t used it; it sucks, but less than the other choices; and so on. One that often doesn’t show up in print is, it’s not very good, but I can’t afford what I want. The point here is one should examine the alternatives available before looking at Crowd/Herd statistics.

Finally there is expectation management. Preparing for cruising is like cruising itself. If one expects problems every step of the way, the few that crop up seem smaller and more manageable. If one takes the optimistic tack, we’ll likely see the boat on the hard in a backwater marina waiting for a discount buyer to finish the prep/cruise.

ChrisW

Thank you , John. We are on our sixth cruising boat. Only one was a horror story— the first (it was finely crafted from ply-rot). And it was a case of shame on the seller. We knew after that boat it would be shame on us. Of all I wrote, for us, expectation management paid off the most with our “fleet.”.

ChrisW

Nah, that was boat envy!

Marc Dacey

An excellent comment. I have spent a few years now essentially gutting and rebuilding a custom-built boat in order to make my own mistakes and to make it simpler to service and operate. Although there are exceptions, my trust in the morals and acumen of salespeople and “marine mechanics” is very low, based largely on what I hear from other people, and I have tried to, therefore, teach myself the skills needed to “repair boats in exotic places”. We’ll see how we do out there sooner than later. I love the bit about “expectation management”!

Deb

Marc,

Expectations are so crucial to the outcome of any venture that nearly the entire first chapter of the book is dedicated to it. Expectations form the framework in which our experiences will live.

Deb
S/V Kintala
“How NOT to Buy a Cruising Boat”
http://www.theretirementproject.blogspot.com

Deb

First of all, thank you John for your review. I look forward to feedback from the readers on this site because, while sometimes boisterous, the comments are always intelligent, thoughtful, and well-founded, unlike so many other blogs and websites dedicated to sailing and cruising.

Chris – Your comments are spot-on. The one factor you failed to mention, though, is trust. Because so many potential cruisers make the decision to cruise with very little prior knowledge of boats, their systems, or even sailing, they find it necessary to trust professionals that they assume (incorrectly) have the knowledge and skills to help them realize their dream. The largest factor contributing to our travails was our background in aviation. With that aviation background we were at least fortunate enough to KNOW that we didn’t know squat and did what we would have done in the aviation world: looked to professionals for the knowledge and skills we were missing. The difficulty, as John intimated in his post, is that “marine” and “professional” are two words not frequently associated, and the ability to trust wholly left out of the equation. And in case you think that we are exceedingly rare, a rather high percentage of cruisers we meet are either pilots or aviation mechanics so I imagine the trust issue has bitten more than a few.

Deb
S/V Kintala
“How NOT to Buy a Cruising Boat”
http://www.theretirementproject.blogspot.com

ChrisW

Thank you, Deb. We followed your blog for quite a while.

There is a Russian proverb: “doveryai no proveryai.” Trust, but verify.

We recently got bitten by a marine service provider. He told us the job was done. He launched the boat and rerigged her. We showed up to take delivery, and as I went down the list on the work order, I noticed something not checked off. When I asked him about it, I got a blank stare and “my guys said they couldn’t find any of those on the hull.” I pulled out my phone and showed him the picture I had taken of the items when the boat was hauled. He removed the considerable charge, but at that point we would have had to derig and haul again to finish the work, We hired a diver when we got back to our marina instead.

He trusted his crew, but didn’t verify. We trusted him but didn’t verify. He’s a big-shot in the world of sailing and we have been owned by cruising boats for 43 years. . .

ChrisW

Thank you, Deb. We followed your blog for quite a while.
T

Erik Snel

Recently I have hesitated in advising some people on how to start with a (2nd hand) cruising yacht. My gut feeling was that it would be a good idea to start out like we did, with a smaller starter yacht, to learn and be able to better choose a larger (and thus more expensive) yacht. This is the way we started out. However, looking back, the smaller yacht cost me a lot of additional money (although I reclaimed part through selling with profit) and even more time. I now feel that maybe we would have been better off saving all that time and money for our current yacht. On the other hand, we learned quite a lot with our starter yacht too…
What are your thoughts on this?

ChrisW

We have cruised with 25, 23, 29, 18, 40, and 40 foot boats. We found that size in not measured in feet or cu ft or tons (tonnes). We believe size is measured in comfort — fiscal and physical.

A boat that is a financial burden is too big no matter how small.

A boat that is a physical chore to maintain and sail and maneuver under power is too big no matter how small.

A boat that fails to provide the space humans need to maintain their sanity and healthy relationships is too small no matter how big.

So for my thinking the questions are: Can I afford this with out sweating the bucks or cutting corners? Can I handle this in all the situations I’m likely to encounter with my cruising plans? Can I maintain my sanity and relationships aboard this boat.

Let the size be a derivative not a driver.

Stein Varjord

Frequently when reading posts here on AAC, I wish there was a “Like” button, as on Facebook. 🙂 This post and especially your first one above, are so interesting and spot on that I wish for an “Applause” button!

Deb

Erik,

John is right that the answer to your question is “It depends…” Our decision to begin our cruising journey with a starter boat had to do with several factors. 1) We weren’t sure that selling everything and moving onto a boat full time was something we were actually going to like doing since we had never sailed prior to that point, 2) We were still working so we had a good bit of disposable income but didn’t want to commit the amount of money for a full size cruising boat in the event that we decided we didn’t like the life, 3) We knew we needed time to learn how to live and work on a boat which we did every weekend for 6 years, 4) We had a great lake nearby to learn on. As discussed at great length in the book, this approach may not be for everyone.

We did, in fact, talk about the possibility of downsizing to a small efficiency early on and saving every penny till we were ready to go, traveling to Florida, buying our cruising boat, refitting it and leaving. This approach would have ended our cruising dreams post haste as we grossly underestimated the amount it would take to accomplish the purchase and refit and would have exhausted our funds without employment to produce more. We had been told by the “experts” that it would take 30-40% of the purchase price to get a boat ready for cruising. With our experience in aviation, we knew to increase that with a sizable safety margin, but it was still inadequate. We were technically more knowledgeable than most people we run into out cruising, prepared better than most, and still got caught short. I believe, though, that had we not bought our starter boat we would never have succeeded at all.

Deb
S/V Kintala
“How NOT to Buy a Cruising Boat”
http://www.theretirementproject.blogspot.com

Matt

Well, the safe answer is of course “it depends…..”

Broadly speaking, though, when people ask me this question, the answer usually works out to be some form of “start with something inexpensive and trailer-sized”.

It is possible to decide “we’re going to sell the house and go cruising” with no prior experience, and succeed. (See, for example, http://www.zerotocruising.com .)

In the learning phase, though, it’s very helpful to have a platform that will teach you what you don’t know you need to know. Things like how to trace a wiring fault, or whether you like water-skiing more than you like anchoring out, or how to deal with a grounding. You don’t want a huge amount of capital tied up in this project, because you are going to break a lot of things and it may turn out that boating is not for you after all.

A few seasons of day and weekend trips on an inexpensive lake/inshore boat will teach you a huge amount about boat handling, safety, maintenance, different cruising lifestyles, and much more. Meanwhile, you’re still working and saving up for the big boat. The 25-footer will generally be easy to sell on a quick turnaround if you decide you’re ready to move up to a long-range cruiser, or if you decide to buy a motorhome instead.

If, on the other hand, you go straight for the big yacht, all the same new-boater risks and pitfalls apply…. but they’re multiplied by the 10x greater financial risk of having a $120,000 yacht in play rather than a $12,000 trailer cruiser.

Dick Stevenson

Hey all,
Among the many reasons why buying/kitting out an offshore boat has had such a disastrous outcome for so many and is/was challenging for us all: ultimately, I look to consumer ignorance as the bottom line. And lest I get accused for blaming the victim, let me assure you I see many others collude with the general sailing public being so poorly educated. The only way to counteract this is through better knowledge and education dispersal: one of the very great appeals of the AAC site.
The collusive parties include:
The maritime media big time. They are, in execution and in general, far more an advertising supplement to the maritime industry than any sort of journalistic enterprise with the best interests of their readers in the forefront of their concerns.
The maritime industry: dealers, chandleries, manufacturers, At least one expects them to be committed to their product: so a buyer beware headset is hardly unwise.
The maritime support people: boatyard personnel, surveyors, “independent” brokers, rally operators etc. where the expectation of expertise, integrity, and “on your side”-edness is expected and so often leads to disappointment.
And lest one see the above people as largely venal: some are of course, but most are just self-servingly not willing to give the whole story while many are as poorly educated/experienced as those they are advising. How many of the above operate with any commitment to education when it may reflect adversely on an element of the industry or their bottom line? How often have you felt the above institutions to admirably hold the best interests of you, the consumer, foremost?
There are also impressively few examples of boats that are solid offshore boats, so that wandering the boatyards/marinas/boat shows of the world is not educative of what goes into a seaworthy offshore cruising boat- one that meets the criteria that John has suggested as baseline. This is made more difficult as the criteria of relevance is generally not easily noticeable to the casual or uneducated eye. Thereby throwing one back on relying on manufacturers etc. to give reliable reports on their construction methods. A vicious circle fraught with pitfalls.
And, for sure, the victim participates. Think about the last time you heard about a nascent offshore person/couple who had steeped themselves in the reading the gurus of cruising: the Hiscocks and their lot. There is a lot of wisdom in those tomes. Also, think of the number of skippers you have seen, and may know, who believe that they can just jump into offshore sailing, often by spending money on a bigger boat with lots of safety bells and whistles.
Another contributing factor, I suspect, is that the pathways to learning are different nowadays. It used to be common for there to be what I think of as “guild” type learning/training which includes apprenticeship, incremental accrual of knowledge/experience over longer periods of time. I believe there to be less tolerance in the modern world for a “guild” type learning pathway and much hype about the various methods for gaming the learning curve.
We are also relatively few in number, often isolated and on our own (less so now with the internet) and inventing/re-inventing the wheel as we go along. By the nature of our interests, we do not congregate in large numbers so much of the above is understandable.
The heartening element in all this is that knowledge will emerge as, ours is an enterprise where it becomes abundantly clear what works and what does not: Mother Nature sees to that. Our responsibility is to ensure that her teachings get widely distributed.
My best, Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy

Deb

John,

So true on this point and there was certainly no one more susceptible to that than T.J. and I. He was an on-demand corporate pilot during our cruising prep and I was a salaried aviation marketing / parts guru, both working for demanding bosses. That being said, the very best training money we spent was our trips with John Kretschmer and most anybody who can afford his week-long trips can benefit from them as intensive guild learning. In fact, we know several Canadians who have since sold their boats and simply take two trips with John every year for their sailing fix. Of course they spend a lot of money with him, but substantially less than buying and maintaining their own boat for a short season and the learning is unparalleled. We receive no compensation from John for our recommendation. He has since become a good friend, and our recommendation arises simply from the value his trips provide for new cruisers.

Deb
S/V Kintala
“How NOT to Buy a Cruising Boat”
http://www.theretirementproject.blogspot.com

Deb

Dick,

Well said. While I agree that education is necessary and would certainly increase the odds of success, in our case it still did not alleviate our difficulties. Being voracious readers, we did in fact steep ourselves in reading the gurus of cruising for 6 years prior to leaving. We listened to all of the old salts and bought our boat based on that knowledge. It just turned out that, for us, that type of boat was not the correct one.

Our experience goes to show that you can do everything right and still have a nightmare of an experience. Surely, several exceptions stood out as we made our progression to full time cruising. Had it not been for the knowledge we received from the AAC site, and a few other exceptionally well-crafted blogs, as well as the “guild” learning we accrued from our interactions and trips with John Kretschmer, we would surely have failed.

Deb
S/V Kintala
“How NOT to Buy a Cruising Boat”
http://www.theretirementproject.blogspot.com