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Old 09-11-2013, 09:37 AM   #15
psneeld
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City: Ft Pierce
Vessel Name: Sold
Vessel Model: Was an Albin/PSN 40
Join Date: Oct 2011
Posts: 28,149
The trick is to read some previous surveys if you can...even if they are just sample pages...the trouble with references is the person giving the reference...what seems thorough to them may still be a glossing over of important issues because they themselves don't know what's important or not.

My favorite surveyor story is still my "great" , "highly recommended", "nitpicky" surveyor that wrote of a major safety issue on my last boat. My compass had a 1/2 inch air bubble in it. It in NO WAY affected the performance of the compass and the compass was a much better compass than often found on similar class vessels.

So of course the insurance company "insisted" that it was a safety item and it had to be fixed prior to moving my boat. My navigational limits were the confines of the Chesapeake and Delaware bays...but that compass better be fixed...even though major electrical and ac salt waters plumbing issues that the surveyor missed almost caused fires and flooding over the next couple of years.

Again...my point isn't as much of a slam on surveyors as it is on the insurance industry...plus as sellers we don't like surveyors dismantling or destructively testing and as buyers, we hate paying all that money for a survey to walk away from boats that are close.....

The system seems a little out of whack to me and the more experienced I become...the worse it gets...especially when trying to talk to an insurance company.

I just changes to a liveaboard policy and it went up 25%...yet the boat is way safey, better maintained, watched closely every day...etc...etc. Yet I can see their point because some liveaboards are a bigger risk...some aren't. They make NO effort to find out which group you fall into and their fallback is using a surveyor which as I've posted often glosses over the hidden "dangers" because of how business is done.
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