3 documentsBoat Buying
Boat Buying Checklists & Pre-Purchase Systems
Structured working documents for the weeks between finding a boat and signing for it. Inspection checklists, sea trial logs and offer worksheets you fill in on an iPhone at the boatyard, or print for a clipboard.
- pages in all
- 169
- live fields
- 3,514
- models
- 22
- each
- $97
Buying a used boat is a six-figure engineering decision made in an afternoon, usually with a phone note and a good memory. These systems replace that with a sequence: what to look at, in what order, what to write down at each step, and how to turn the findings into a documented position at the negotiating table.
Every document records and organises. None of them issue verdicts. That is your surveyor's work, and a completed Apex checklist makes it faster and better targeted.
Guides
Guides for this system
Buying a boat
Three documents, one sequence: look at her, run her, price her. Most buyers do all three and keep the results in three different places. A phone note, a memory, and a number that came from somewhere.
The defect you noticed and did not write down
Nobody forgets a serious defect. What gets lost is the small one seen in the third hour of a viewing, in a locker, while the broker was talking. It was real, and by the evening it has become an impression rather than an observation.
That matters because you cannot price what you cannot describe. A finding with a location, a photograph reference, a severity and a date is a line in a negotiation. The same finding remembered vaguely is a feeling, and feelings do not survive contact with a seller.
The kit that structures the viewingThree hours you cannot repeat for free
A sea trial happens once, in one sea state, with the seller aboard and the clock running. Everything you fail to record in those hours has to be taken on trust or paid for again.
The difference between a useful sea trial and a pleasant afternoon is whether the observations were timed, located and written in a form that can be compared: engine behaviour under load at a stated point, handling noted at a stated heading, the same checks run in both directions.
The log that makes those hours countEleven findings, of which three reach the broker
A long list of small items reads as haggling and hardens the other side. A short list of material findings, each with its own evidence and a costed remedy, reads as a position.
Turning one into the other is arithmetic, not rhetoric. Severity assigned at the viewing, a quote or an estimate attached to each, and a total that stands on its own. The findings you drop are as deliberate as the ones you keep.
The worksheet that costs the findingsWhere to start, by what you are buying
A first boat. The Due Diligence Kit, in your hand before you are aboard. Structure and honesty come before cosmetics, and the kit keeps you on the parts that decide whether she is worth a survey at all.
A boat to cruise or live aboard. The Due Diligence Kit again, weighted toward systems: tankage, ground tackle, charging, and whether the engine arrives with a history or only an hour meter.
A club racer. Start with the same kit, then read it beside the rig and sail registers. The money in a used raceboat sits in the standing rigging and the wardrobe, and both are easy to underestimate at a viewing.
An offer to make, or a survey report in hand. The Budget Worksheet. It is where findings become a number.
What you will not find in any of them
No moisture percentage. No acceptable engine hours for an age. No figure for what a finding \"should\" knock off a price. No statement of what a survey must contain, or of what any jurisdiction requires of a sale.
Not one published threshold, tolerance, rate or service life, here or anywhere else in this catalogue. Those figures exist, and they belong to your manufacturer's documentation in the revision matching your serial number, to the professional who worked on your boat, and to your own installation. A document that prints them has copied somebody else's equipment and handed you the risk.
Every register here opens the same way. A reference page where you transcribe your own figures, with the source document and its revision beside each line. A commissioning baseline. Then a deviation log measured against both. The models do the arithmetic from there.
That is not a limitation we apologise for. It is the product.