Mid Size Power Boats

Are You a Candidate for a Being Happy Boat Owner?

This is a subject you are not likely to find in any other book, mainly because, unlike most other writers, I’m not trying to sell you a boat.

It concerns me not a bit whether you buy one or not, so if I save you from making a mistake, this book will have fulfilled its purpose.

My job here is to provide you with accurate, honest information, and in that vein I’m going to talk about some of the more serious and unpleasant risks and responsibilities involved in boat ownership.

Buying a large boat is something you want to do with your eyes wide open. Like buying stock for your 401k, if you take advice from people who sell the stuff, you’re likely to run into trouble.

There are three main and several secondary reasons why people get into trouble with boats:

Ownership usually proves more costly than they expected, it involved more work than anticipated, or it turned out that they didn’t have as much time as they thought they’d have to use the boat, or any combination of the three.

Other more marginal, though no less relevant reasons are that some people buy into something they should know that they can’t afford, or that other members of the family don’t care for (mainly the wife) but the buyer tries to push on them.

A final, and fairly common mistake comes to the person who is determined to buy cheap in a world dictated by the rule that there are no free lunches except from the government. Mercifully, the government doesn’t build boats.

It is very easy to get in over one’s head financially through not taking the time to add up all the costs, and including a cushion for unanticipated expenses.

Many people make the mistake of buying a new boat with the idea that the warranty and insurance are going to eliminate all maintenance and repair costs. Rest assured, these won’t. I explain why further on in this chapter.

Maintaining a boat properly is a lot of work. Always has been, always will be; that’s just the nature of boats, and unless you’re willing to do the work yourself, or can afford to pay someone else (few can), then be prepared to see the resale value of your boat decline very rapidly.

If the best you can do is just tolerate the effort of taking care of it, if you don’t really enjoy this sort of thing, perhaps you should reconsider.

Remember, as a boat owner, everybody loves you when you take them out for a day of fun, but the usual scenario is that when the fun is over and it’s time to do the clean up, repairs and maintenance, those folks tend to disappear or have something better to do.

When it comes time to paint the bottom, compound and wax the boat, clean the bilges, change the oil or lay it up for winter and whatnot, chances are you’ll be doing it all alone.

Those members of the family who so enthusiastically cheered your decision to buy a boat are nowhere to be found when work time rolls around.

It’s like the perennial story of the child who wants a puppy. He begs, pleads and swears that he’ll take care of it. A week later it’s the parents who are cleaning up the endless little “accidents” and feeding it. Ah, the wonderful world of good intentions.

The amount of pleasure that you derive from a boat will be a function of whether you enjoy doing some maintenance, and how often you get to use it.

If you get to use it seldom, chances are it will become a burden. I’ll discuss the issues of maintenance in greater detail a bit further on.

Boating was, is and always will be, a very costly hobby, sport, recreation or whatever you want to call it.

The boating industry has done a lot in recent decades to try to make boating affordable to as many people as possible by making boats as low cost as possible.

The only problem with this results from the fact that boats are vessels that float in water, often salt water, which means that boats tend to deteriorate very rapidly unless they are made with consummate skill and the highest quality materials.

If not, what we may perceive as a reasonably priced boat can end up being far more expensive than we had ever imagined.

The rule of thumb we should always apply to boating is that the need for quality reigns supreme unless we’re willing to see our “investment” in a boat deteriorate very rapidly in a less than high quality product.

When we are finished with a boat, unlike many other products, particularly vehicles, we expect it have substantial residual value.

Boats are just too big and costly to make them disposable. A final responsibility, one that is to ourselves, is to do our best to ensure that that residual value remains as high as possible. That is the other half of the maintenance equation.

The marketing media, of course, presents only the positive side of boating.

Unfortunately, for every hour of fun in the sun, another hour needs to be spent managing and maintaining a boat.

One of the primary reasons why first time boat buyers become last time boat buyers is that the boat demanded more time from them than they could afford.