Again, I want to thank everybody for weighing in with their opinions. It’s really helpful and encouraging to have lots of intelligence and experience out there, and I appreciate the sharing.
Here’s the thing: this is a boat that the owner has lavished with love - but not so much with $$$$. I’m not going to blame him or condemn him or judge him. I know nothing about his personal finances, and maybe love was all that he had to give.
For obscure reasons that are probably irrational (sorry guys!), I prefer not to identify the boat now. (It’s a private sale; not on YW.) I can say, however, that it’s an unusual floor plan on a make and model that we like very much, and that we’ve chartered before. The more-or-less unique layout makes it hard to pass on this one, and move on to the next.
Still, I’m trying to keep my wits about me as we move forward with the transaction. My partner, less so. He is pretty determined to get this boat. Not necessarily hell or high water, but pretty close. His view is that we will be well informed once we get the eyeballs of the surveyors on the boat. We’re having a general survey and mechanical survey. The surveyors are well recommended, and I have confidence that they will do as good a survey in their one day as any surveyors could do.
For me, however, the apparent lack of $$$ spent on the boat simply gives me pause. Yes, I realize that batteries are a relatively small item. At bottom, it’s more the cumulative effect of ALL the things that haven’t been done. 12 year old electronics, 12 year old dinghy. Heck, for all I know the batteries are 12 years old.
On the important stuff, I do know that this boat has a Cummins QSB 5.9 that suffered from a known issue with the lift pump. (That is, it is known that the QSBs of this year had a known issue, and this particular boat has it.) The long and short of it is that when fuel is low, fuel feed gets erratic and the engine sputters. I’ve researched this issue up the wazoo, and there is a pretty well known fix. However, this owner (original owner) for some reason elected not to go with the fix (which is a spiffy after-market pump) but instead elected to install a dip tube to suck fuel from towards the bottom of the tank. His view is that this is OK because the Racors will catch any water in the fuel, and there’s probably not much water in the fuel anyway. If it had been me whose lift pump failed four times . . . .
There you have it. Maybe it’s not a boating issue at all. Maybe it’s a relationship issue. One of us feels strongly committed to this boat. The other of us loves the boat, but has some trepidation about the obvious lack of $$$ investment in upgrades (and, likely, maintenance) over the years.
The surveyors will have the third to last word on this. Thanks again to everyone.