Walk Away...

We wrote a book about being on the buyer’s side of a boat purchase. It is a modestly popular book, selling much better than either of us had anticipated. One of the core ideas in that book was that any potential boat buyer should be spring-loaded to walk away from any deal for pretty much any reason. An idea that, rumor has it, prevented a few people who read the book from getting stuck with a boat that wasn’t right for them.

For now, we are temporarily on land, replenishing the cruising kitty and spending time with family we didn’t see enough of while out wandering the waterways. We are also looking, when the time comes, at going back to the cruising life as trawler dwellers rather than sail boaters. But even if we ultimately decide that sailing is still the way to go, we have decided that Kintala is not the boat on which to live out the closing chapters of our lives. A nearly all-out racing, big-blue-water boat with a few of the harshest racing edges smoothed out a little…making her come to life and romp across the waves as she was designed to do is a little more work than is comfortable for a short-handed crew on the plus end of middle-aged.

So we are now on the seller’s side of the boat purchase equation. An effort that is proving to be just as frustrating, and with just as many pitfalls, as being a buyer. And while my opinion of boat brokers has gone up during this process (our’s working relentlessly on our behalf), that of the marine industry in general, and surveyors in particular, has plummeted to new lows.

After a year of effort we finally had a buyer make an offer on the boat and put down a deposit. All was looking well for closing by the end of the year…then came the survey. The surveyor is said to be young, enthusiastic, not that experienced, and very thorough (I haven’t met her). She even climbed the mast to check the rigging and there discovered that all of the swaged fittings on the standing rigging are cracked.

Big problem.

Big, big problem.

A problem big enough to set any return to the cruising life back a year or more. Rigging is expensive, and getting the job done remotely? A recipe for nothing but endless heartache and delay. Then we would have to start the boat selling process all over again.

We were a bit stunned to hear the news. Kintala’s rigging is only six year old. We had it installed at Oak Harbor just before setting out, an outfit known for building and installing racing rigging. They let me help build and install the rig. Though I am not a sailboat expert (or at least I wasn’t back then) I had spent nearly 4 decades in aircraft maintenance. Wire rigging is nothing new or special just because it is on a boat rather than a plane. It was a fun (if expensive) project and I am forever grateful to the good folks at Oak Harbor for showing me the ropes.

Kintala’s potential buyers, after thinking about it for a day or so, decided that offering a lower price then facing the repairs was not what they wanted, and backed out of the deal. Yes, they read the book and, yes, I was getting a taste of my own advice. I understood, as I would have done the same. Still, we are on the other end of the equation now and it is a pretty massive blow. But life is what it is. Kintala is an older boat. Though we loved her and spent uncounted hours and dollars getting her in the best shape we could, she is not perfect.

Within minutes of learning that the deal was dead, Deb was on the phone, getting quotes on fixing the rig along with other items the surveyor listed that helped scare off the buyers. One is the typical keel smile present on nearly every boat I have ever worked on with a bolted on keel. Another is a soft spot in the foredeck that will take any half-competent glass worker a couple of days to fix. We were told the survey makes a pretty big deal out of each, though I have no clue why that would be the case. I haven’t actually seen the survey. I was told I might be able to buy a copy of it if I liked, something that is not likely to happen before the sun explodes and swallows up this little planet. You will see why in a moment.

As it turned out, the rigger recommended by the yard was actually working in the yard when Deb called him. He was stepping a mast and allowed as he would take a look at Kintala and get us a quote asap. Barely an hour later he called with the news. There is nothing wrong with the rig. What the surveyor described as “cracks” are, in fact, the normal tooling marks that come with building a rig.

Truth to tell, I suspected all along that was what he was going to say. As mentioned, I helped build and install that rig. It is oversized for the boat and we aren’t racers, never pushing the boat to anywhere near its maximum capacity. The only other explanation for what the surveyor “found” was the fittings themselves being defective: not impossible, but pretty unlikely. But it appears to be too late as far as the buyers are concerned. They are new to this cruising world, paid a lot of money for that survey, and are not likely to be easily convinced that there is nothing much wrong with the boat after all.

(A big shout-out to the rigger here. He knew about the survey, could have easily given us a reasonable "quote" for fixing the rig, spent a week working on other things, and sent us a bill along with a couple of cracked fittings laying around his shop.  Being a thousand miles away he might well have gotten away with it.)

So here we are. The rig is fine but the “survey” is out there, authored by a person who, apparently, doesn't have a clue. How a surveyor cannot know about tooling marks and rigging is simply beyond understanding. It is central to what they should know as experts inspecting a boat. Worse, my experience is that a bad survey is like getting a DUI. Even if it turns out the machine was out of calibration and pinged you for the single beer you had at lunch, the stink will linger.

The rigger has agreed to send us a written report on his findings, and we are working toward getting the “smile” and soft deck spot fixed. They are minor issues that a) are likely part of nearly every older boat currently for sale and b) if we were still on the boat, we could fix in about a week. (Indeed, Kintala’s keel smiled at us the first time we saw her, and I’ve fixed two other soft spots on the deck in the ensuing years.) But they now carry “offical” surveyed stink as well.

I guess the good news, for us anyway, is that - had the buyers offered a price contingent on the rig needing repaired - we would have likely said "fine". They would have then had the happy experience of finding out there was nothing wrong and walked away with a smoking good deal on a pretty nice boat. So, in this case, my advice cut both ways.

So it looks like our sojourn on land will likely be extended a bit. Life is what it is. And if one chooses to take part in the business of boats…well…life is what it is.