Used Charter Cats

[morlock]

Any advice or suggestions on the best way to get the good deal/value on the purchase of a used catamaran from a charter company?
Thanks in advance.

[sailingfool]

If you do a lot of homework to thoroughly inform yourself very well on value and the general market, get thorough advice from an expert surveyor, and are very careful and adroit in your negotiotions, the best you can expect from any boat purchase is to actually get what you pay for.
That a charter company that may deal in dozens of boats, knows each of them itimately, will somehow sell one as a good deal to buyer who has no comparable knowledge is an unrealistic expectation. This doesn''t mean that you can''t buy a good boat at a fair value, but the odds arn''t with you in terms of a good deal/value.

Good luck.

[Jeff_H]

The best way to get a good deal from a charter company cat is to not buy one but use it as leverage to negotiate down the price of a privately held cat of the same model. In a general sense, in order to keep weight to a reasonable levelcatamarrans tend to be less robust than monohulls, and because the force loads are so much higher on a catamarran they are really hard on gear and their structural components.

Monohulls in charter come out pretty beat up. Cats come out pretty much used up. Having watched what it took to put an ex-charter cat back together after 3 1/2 years in charter I would say that the best way to get a used cat is to buy a privately owned one and just negotiate the heck out of it. You need to realize that any boat in Charter gets something like 5 to 10 times the number of hours useage that a privately owned coastal cruiser might recieve. In five years in charter these boats get the equivilient of 15 to 20 years of hard use and it is use in a hard environment by people who may not know or care about how to properly care for a boat.

Bad idea all around,
Respectfully,
Jeff