[bporter]

In re: documentation services. If you have a loan on the boat they are helpful. If not, the coast guard forms are available on line and you can do it yourself.

If you have a "Preferred" ships mortgage (i.e. what almost every lender writes on a boat) you have to get a seperate form signed by the bank which complicates things.

We had our recently purchased (used) boat re-documented at purchase by a service. Initial documentation fee was $250 to the service plus the Coast Guard documentation fees ($84 for a reissue/sale, plus like another $22 or so in filing fees. It''s $133 for a 1st time documentation)

Because we''re boneheads and couldn''t settle on a new name for the boat prior to the closing, we then had to redocument to get the new name on record. The documentation service was nice enough to offer us a half price on the re-documentation since they just did the docs in November, so it was $125 to them, plus $84 to the CG for the new certificate + $24 for the "Approval of Change requiring Mortgagee Consent" for the CG requires with the Mortgage.

If we did not have a mortgage on the vessel I could easily have filled out the two page form and spent only the $84 for the coast guard fees to rename her.

Defintely block out money for post survey work. Surveyors aren''t perfect, they''ll miss stuff. And not everything they recommend is an absolute must either, a good surveryor will tell you that he''s professionally bound to msake the observation but will also talk about how serious the problem really is.

Also, watch the survey on the sails. You almost want to figure something into you budget for purchase or repair. They are very difficult to determine condition on without actually hoisting them and looking at the shape. On one boat purchase I had a sail marked in "Good" condition on the survey that as soon as we hoisted it, it started dropping chunks of Mylar on the deck as we watched it delaminate in front of us. Another one had mildew spots on it, still sailed but kind of baggy and ugly. So the survey came back with all of these "nice" sails, and I bought two new ones the next year anyway.