Buying Your Boat: After the Survey

The survey will give you a list of everything that is wrong with the boat. On this list will be things that are not really important as well as major issues.

Minor things could be burned out cabin lights or worn varnish. Major things could be hull delamination, engine problems, leaks, ect.

This list gives you impressive leverage to lower your original offer and the seller will be compelled to negotiate. The seller knows that he is dealing with an interested buyer, so they don't want to lose you! When you tell the seller you want to take $10,000 off the offer, the seller would laugh at you! After the survey, you could tell the seller you want to take $10,000 off the offer because that is the cost of repairing these specific issues listed in the survey. Now the seller will be more inclined to lower the price.

Items on the list that are great for lowering the asking offer are unimportant problems. My favorite are broken electronic devices, as the boat will not sink because the radar isn't working. These units can be expensive to repair and will give you lots of bargaining power! Getting a quote from the boat yard to repair the damaged equipment is the best way to give the owner a sound number that you wish to reduce the agreed offer.

My dad did this when he purchased his boat. The deck had a soft spot in the forepeak and the yard quoted $12,000 to fix the deck. The seller then reduced the agreed offer by $12,000! My dad and I then proceeded to repair the rotten decking. We peeled up the non-skid of the deck, removed all the rotten wood, made a template inside the forepeak, and laid down a new deck and core. The whole ordeal took us only 2 hours to complete and cost my dad less than $100 in materials. In other words, my dad got $11,900 off because of the findings in the survey.

My sister on the other hand had the opposite experience when looking at a boat being sold by a non-motivated seller. After the survey, it was found that one of the transmissions is failing and deck-hull junction has separated a bit in one area. The estimated cost to repair these two issues was $25,000 and the owner refused to adjust the price. His claim is that there is nothing wrong with the boat and he shouldn't come down in price. Purchasing a boat needing expensive repairs for full price is not wise, so this is when you walk away from the deal.

If you can do the repairs yourself, you can have the repair amount removed from the purchase price of the boat and repair it later as your budget and time allows. If you have to pay someone to repair it, the repair can always be carried out at a later point in time when your wallet has recovered from the purchase of your new yacht. 

Buying Your Boat: Starting the Process

Once you find your dream boat, it is a matter of going through the motions to make this boat yours. The steps are: Contact, Look at the boat, Offer, Survey, and Sea Trial.

It all begins with contacting the person who is selling it. If you found it in a local paper or while walking the docks, you will probably deal directly with the owner. If you found it through a broker or on yachtworld.com, then you will be in touch with the broker. You make a phone call and set up a time to see the boat. While looking at the boat, you fall in love and decide that this is the boat for you! 

The next step is to put an offer on the boat (contingent on survey and sea trial) and wait for the owner to either accept, deny, or counter offer. If he accepts your offer without counter offer, you are dealing with a motivated seller and the following steps will be a breeze!

If the owner denies the offer, then the deal stops there. You can try a new offer that is higher but this is not a good idea as the owner might think he could hold out and see how high your offers could go. Instead, let the owner stew on his denial and wait around. Soon he will realize that no one else is looking at his boat and you are his only chance of a sale. Eventually, the owner will come back with a counter offer.

After the offer or counter offer is accepted, the sale of the boat will proceed to the next step: Survey and Sea Trial. A survey is the equivalent of a home inspection. The surveyor will comb over every inch of the boat, checking all the systems and accessories, along with the hulls condition. 

After the survey is completed, the surveyor will provide you with a paper detailing all of his "recommendations". This is the laundry list of everything that is wrong or not functioning on the boat. The more systems the boat has, the longer this list will be. The owner then has three choices:

• Fix everything on the list himself and then sell you the boat at the agreed offer.
• Reduce the price based on the cost to repair everything that is wrong.
• Refuse to adjust the price.

It is silly for a seller to try to fix everything himself because in the time of repairs, more systems could fail or break. Also, you could find another boat, leaving him with the repaired boat and no buyer.

Reducing the price based on the cost to repair everything that is wrong is the best plan. The seller gets rid of the boat and the buyer has to fix everything himself. This works out best for the buyer as well in points that will be discussed later.

The last option is for the seller to refuse to adjust the price based on the survey. This occurs for one of two reasons: The seller is not motivated to sell and doesn't want to let his baby go for less money, or, the offer price is so low that the seller doesn't want to come down any further. 

After the survey comes the sea trial which is the equivalent of a test drive in a car. This is also the last opportunity for the buyer to back out of the deal. During the sea trial, if there is any reason you do not want to purchase the boat, you can walk away from the deal without penalty. You could even claim that you don't like the noise of the engine, or the way it leans! This is your last chance to walk away form your dream boat if you so choose to.

After the sea trial, if everything is up to your liking, the boat can be yours. All you have to do at this point is pay the sum of money to buy her and she is yours! Smaller boats can be paid in cash, but larger boats tend to be paid with a certified check.

Once the monetary exchanges have been made, a trip to the local Natural Resources office will finalize the arrangement. Both parties, buyer and seller, will go to the office and sign some documents to transfer ownership of the boat. Now the boat is yours!

Wing Keels

Fin keels are a very broad category of keel which is characterized by a high aspect ratio appendage. Within this category are a vast world of variations and subtle differences that give rise to very different performance characteristics.

The theory behind a fin keel is the leading edge will produce lift which will carry the boat to windward. The whole keel is shaped like an air foil to aid in generating lift and make the entire system much more efficient. ​

To create more leading edge, you simply need to have a longer appendage, simple! The problem is a longer appendage directly translates into deeper draft. For yacht builders, a deeper draft means that buyers in shallow waterways will not buy their product. Yacht builders want to be able to sell their yachts to everyone, which means that they need to produce a yacht with a shallow enough draft that it will appeal everyone while still retaining the desired performance attributes that will make them competitive when compared to deeper draft competitors.​

Yachts compete on windward performance and on their ability to sail into ​shallow waters. Naturally, these two camps are on opposite sides of the spectrum. You can either sail to windward OR get into shallow waters, not both with a regular keel.

This is where the wing keel shines. A wing keel is a regular fin keel with small wings projecting to the sides at the tip of the keel. These little wings serve two purposes: They provide more leading edge length and they create less drag from tip vortices.

Adding wings naturally adds more leading edge to the keel, but instead of adding more leading edge in a downward direction, the leading edges now travel laterally. This is supposed to produce the same lift generated as a longer fin keel without the added draft.

Tip vortices directly relate to drag, and reducing these will reduce drag. Reducing drag will directly result in an increase in speed and higher performance! Tip vortices occur at the end of every airfoil. On an active airfoil, there will be a high pressure side and a low pressure side. The air foil in the middle acts to separate the two pressures and the resulting pressure differential will drive the airfoil. At the tip, there is no airfoil separating the two pressures and the high pressure side will spill over into the low pressure side, resulting in a vortex that trails along the tip of the airfoil.

A small wing at the tip will help reduce the spillover of pressures and reduce the size of the vortex. Air planes use these winglets at the tips of their wings to reduce drag and improve fuel economy, and sailboats use them too in the form of a wing keel. The wings on the sides of the tips are supposed to reduce drag by reducing the tip vortex.

While a wing keel may sound like the perfect solution to a sailor who is searching for a high performance yacht with a shallow draft, but they do have an additional problem with groundings.

Fin keels are rather weak and can suffer great damage during a grounding, but the sailboat can usually work its way off a shoal with enough effort. A fin keel will dig into the bottom, and be easily pull free from the bottom as you work yourself off a shoal. A wing keel on the other hand will dig into the bottom and get really stuck! Those wings will act like anchor flukes which will dig in and hold if you run aground in soft mud. 

If you plan on sailing a fin keeled yacht into shallow waters and are looking at a wing keel for the added performance, be weary! If you are going to explore into shallow waters, you will eventually touch the bottom!  When this happens, getting off will be a much harder ordeal. You may think you will never run aground, but it will happen if you like to explore shallow waters.

Wing keels supposedly offer added performance benefits with a shallower draft, but don't abuse of the shallow draft and go looking for trouble in waters where you can't float.

Fin Keel Weakness

Fin keels compliment the sails of a sailboat remarkably. High aspect ratio keels, just like high aspect ratio sails, offer gains in performance while reducing the effects of unneeded drag and weight. While these underwater appendages work astoundingly well, they do have their limitations. If you are able to sail without conflicting with these weaknesses, a fin keel can serve your yacht very well. On the contrary, if you find that these weaknesses will interfere with your ideal method of cruising, a fin keel would not be your ideal setup.

Fin keels attach to the bottom of the hull via a small contact area. This small area has to withstand all the stress placed on it by the forces acting on the hull and the keel. When your yacht catches a puff of wind and heels over, the force on the sails heels your boat over while the force on the keel tries to right the yacht. The junction of the keel and hull is under extreme stress as the hull is trying to pull up while the keel is trying to pull down. If you combine these stresses with heavy pounding seas, the loads experienced by this small area will climb exponentially. With time and stress, fatigue will set in and stress crack will begin to form around junction of the keel and hull. 

Another problem with fin keels is they are not very well protected from impact. They are, by design, a very long lever arm. If you were to strike an underwater object, be it a sunken log or the sea bed, this force is going to be multiplied and then transmitted to the rest of the yacht via a very small area. This small area will be subjected to extreme loads and can form cracks.  

In the Chesapeake Bay, most creeks are around 4.5 to 5 feet deep. Sailboats with shallow enough drafts will attempt to enter these waters, typically running aground at some point during their life. When a grounding occurs, the forces excerpted on the keel are enough to create these characteristic cracks in the front of the keel near the hull.  

These cracks are just the visible damage that occurs to the yacht, but the forces run much deeper and so do the damages. The bolts that attach the keel to the hull are located in the bottom of the bilge and are often bathed in bilge water for the life of the yacht, causing corrosion to wreck havoc on the bolts. The combination of these bolts rusting away and the forces from an impact can cause the keel to actually fall off! If the keel falls off, you now have two very major problems.  

First, the keel is gone and the keel bolt holes (which are rather large) are open and flowing a lot of water into the hull. If these holes are not plugged quickly, your yacht could sink from the in flowing water! 

Second, the keel is gone! You no longer have any ballast or righting moment to counter the sails. If a puff of wind heels you over, you will capsize! Worst of all, if you do capsize, you will not right yourself because the ballast is gone. Losing your keel is not just terrible, it is horrible! 

If you decide on a yacht with a fin keel, don't try exploring shallow waters. If you run aground, damage will occur to your underwater appendages and the repairs can be quite costly. Think of a fin keel yacht as a deep water dream machine! It will glide through the waves with ease and efficiency, but it is a fragile dream machine. If you hit it too hard, it will break along with your dreams. 

Fin Keels

Fin keels are the epitome of performance! They project out of the hull as a high aspect ratio appendage with a long leading edge to generate as much lift as possible with as little drag as possible. The narrow fin slices through the water with ease and its airfoil shape adds to its efficiency.  

The long fin keel locates the mass of the ballast far from the hull, providing a long lever arm to aid in righting moment. This added leverage uses the ballast more efficiently which means that less ballast is needed. Less ballast also means less weight which directly relates to the yacht having a lighter displacement. Lighter displacement gives the sailboat greater speeds in light airs, and much greater speeds overall. Fin keels truly are the ideal underwater appendage from a performance standpoint! 

If your dream yacht is a high performance machine that will zip through the water toward your destination, be sure that you size your keel accordingly to the waters you intend to navigate. The longer the keel, the better the yachts ability to point, but the yacht will also have a deeper draft. 

If you plan to cruise in waters that average around 6 feet deep, then a 10 foot keel may be problematic. Your cruising grounds will be severely restricted and limited to only the deeper areas. If you went with a shorter fin keel, you will still have the performance benefits of a fin keel with the increased cruising realm of shallower waters. 

It would behave you to look over the charts of your intended navigable waters and examine the charted depths. Identify the creeks and rivers you wish to sail into and record their water depths. By compiling the data by depth, you can see how different drafts will remove potential cruising waters.  

For example:

Creek A, Creek B, and Creek C have depths of 4 feet;
Creek D, River E, and Bay F have depths 5 feet;
River G, Bay H, and Creek I have depths of 6 feet.  

If you choose a boat with a draft less than 4 feet, you could cruise all the bodies of water that you have identified.
If you choose a boat with a draft less than 5 feet, you can no longer enter Creek A, B, or C. 
If you choose a boat with a draft less than 6 feel, you can only cruise in River G, Bay H, and Creek I.

If you did not look at your local charts before you purchased your yacht with a 10 foot draft, you would be disappointed when you can not enter any of the cruising waters you wanted to explore! 

While fin keels are excellent performers, be sure to size your keel accordingly to the waters you wish to cruise instead of solely focusing on the performance aspects of the keel length.