More Info: YachtSpecsDirect.com We wanted to Explain the Survey in Three Phases. If you're in the market for a New or Used Yacht this Season, please contact: TS@MintedYachts.com

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Investing in a Yacht is an important Personal and Financial Decision. Learn about how to properly select a Surveyor and what happens on the Day of a Survey.

Tony Smith is Certified Professional Yacht Broker and is licensed for sales Nationally. Additionally he holds Brokerage License in Florida and California.

Learn from the Professionals to avoid Costly Boat Buying Mistakes. Alway get the boat you're buying Surveyed.


So three components of survey day are the surveyor, the haul out and the sea trial. So there's many licensed surveyors that are out there. We always recommend that you check the SAMS website, that's the Society of Accredited Marine Surveyors to get a background on your surveyor and make sure they're a good fit for you and your process and your boat. The next big component, well, what the surveyor is going to do is they're basically going to go through every major system in the boat. They're going to look in all the cabinets. They're going to look under the floorboards. They're going to find if there's rust or any areas of neglect, and they're going to recommend certain items that may or may not need maintenance done to them. The big thing that we want to find, it's not so much the cosmetic things, but it's the major mechanical things that we're going to look for.

And that comes out in the next phases, which are the haul out phase, where we'll actually take the boat to a boat yard, and they're going to put it in a lift, haul the boat out of the water. And then we're able to check the paint on the bottom. And then all the struts, the propellers, the bearings, any of the running gear below the waterline is checked at the haul out. And that will really reveal a lot of things. Some of the major things, especially if you're going to do extended cruising, come up at the haul out. And so that can either be good or bad, but either way you want to know what's going on underneath the boat. So the haul out phase does that. And then the third phase is the sea trial. So during the sea trial, the boat is taken out into the open ocean, it's run at various speeds, and the performance of the boat is checked.

Now, one key thing about this is the engine temperature. So most of these larger boats are turbocharged diesel engines, and with a turbocharged diesel engine, they're raw water cooled through a heat exchanger that cools the freshwater coolant, just like a radiator in a car. So with the heat exchanger, there's a heat exchanger normally in a after cooler or intercooler, and then an oil cooler. So what that means is that raw water goes through the engine, or that side of the engine, and the heat exchanger itself periodically needs to be serviced, normally about every five years or so, that oil assembly needs to be disassembled. And then the heat exchanger, they use acid to dissolve all the barnacles and growth and other things in the heat exchanger itself. And then they pressure test it, put new gaskets on it, and then reassemble the whole thing. So if a boat has not been ran, and it's just sitting around, or over the years, barnacles and stuff will grow in the heat exchanger. And so that's just a fact of life in the saltwater.

And so we want to make sure when we're on the sea trial phase, that the engines don't heat up and cause an issue there. The other major item that can come up is the smoke coming out of the motors itself. If you see white smoke or dark smoke, they all could be symptoms of something going on. A big thing is turbochargers every five years or so. Again, the turbochargers need to be rebuilt and rebalanced. If the turbochargers are not performing, if they're not pushing enough oxygen in, or compressed air, and then you don't get the explosion that you need. And then you can be dumping diesel through, which comes out as black smoke. So all these little telltale signs of the performance of the engine, these are all things that we try to find during the survey day. So we'll look at the next steps. We're very excited to get this boat on the water and see how it goes.

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