8. Lazy Gecko Sailing - Our Gecko

Randy, actually we just decided that may just go down there! We are working all the details out now and we will let you know once we have everything finalized!! - Brittany

Lazy Gecko Sailing

are you going to the Miami Boat Show? thinking of meeting up with Miss Lone Star group. Love to meet you guys as well.

No problem at all! We appreciate you supporting us and are very happy to provide all the information that we can! I'm the same way about researching. Yes, it just didn't feel right. It was hard to walk away but we knew there would be a boat that was perfect somewhere. Thanks for the link, I'll certainly take a look at it!

Lazy Gecko Sailing

Thanks that's great info! So happy you found something you love. I know that feeling when something just doesn't feel right and then you walk away and feel so much better about your decision. Congrats on your new home! I am very anal about research before making a purchase. So I can only imagine what a decision like this must be like. I would like to recommend some leisurely reading about boating, pitfalls and gotchas. It more based toward power boating but the info I found invaluable. Take a look at <a href="http://www.yachtsurvey.com/." rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.yachtsurvey.com/.</a> Hopefully you or someone else might find it helpful as I did.

Great questions! He got there at 8am and he finished around 4pm...Without a break so it took him about 7 hours total. There are only different levels of inspection based on what you want him to do. The most detailed inspection is the "pre-purchase" inspection. That's the one you want. They do insurance inspections and others but the pre-inspection is what you want when buying. When we got a survey in Miami it was $1000 for a 40' boat, Jim was $18 a foot up in Jacksonville, he rounded it down to $600 when I went to pay so that was nice. He really didn't find much wrong except for the fire extinguishers, they should be replaced just because the powder gets hard of they sit too long. So negotiating was out the window haha...The boat was listed at 47k, we came in at 37k cash...We figured we didn't have anything to lose and they came back at 39k, we accepted. They were pretty disappointed in how low they sold the boat but hey, we'll take it. They had to mail a cushion from back home and I tried to get them to cover it...She was NOT budging on it...So we split that $50. The boat was rated above average and valued at 50k-55k by the surveyor...When I told him the price we had agreed on, he agreed that it was a good deal. The deposit for Dejavu was returned the day that we decided against it. The owner was cool about it, we just didn't feel safe on it honestly and thats what it came down to. Lessons learned...Don't trust anyone...If someone keeps saying "You're getting a good boat"...It probably isn't and you need to walk away haha. Do not, under any circumstances trust that a survey was done correctly if you weren't there. Research how to do a survey yourself and then do it yourself BEFORE calling a surveyor....You can find deal killers before someone else comes out and you pay them 1k to find it. I think thats about it! Please let me know if you have anymore questions!

Lazy Gecko Sailing

How long did it take for him to do the survey? Is there different levels of detail? At different price points? Did anything he found help you negotiate the purchase price? I remember somewhere in earlier videos you said you had to put down a larger deposit on the original boat you were looking at. Did you lose that? What were the strongest issues that made you walk away from it and were there any lessons learned from that experience you could share with us?

Hi Randy! We tried to do that although I do wish we had been able to put more up about it. We made sure to stay right with Jim so we could get a very good view of the condition she was in and that resulted in not having a ton of footage. If you have questions about specifics please just let us know! We are going to put up a blog post with the survey itself as well! We hope you're doing well!

Lazy Gecko Sailing

So glad you took us through the survey and haul out process. Thanks! Great Info!