Moonlighting as a surveyor

So, Cass's mom called her a week or so ago and said, "I found you a boat, its cute and you should buy it!" Thus began this saga. In Bellingham a guy was selling his Samurai 28, a Japanese built version of the Herreshoff H-28. They are double planked, with the outer skin Philippine mahogany. He only wanted $5,000 for it, so we went to the 'Ham to check it out where it was hauled out to see if she wanted to even go as far as hiring a real surveyor.

Here is the 'report' (in pictures, mostly). NOTE: Through this whole discussion, I may sound like I think I am some kind of surveying genius. I am not. I used all the knowledge I had to learn about the condition of the boat, but I don't want anyone to think that I can give a professional opinion on such matters. I was helping out my girlfriend with a possible boat purchase.

The boat is very pretty, with a good stance for the size. Sloop rig, single spreader low aspect. Initially the hulls looks very fair with no obvious signs of degrading. The hull paint looked really nice topsides.


Here is the name plate.


The first thing that I noticed when looking from below was that the end grain of the plywood decks were not protected at all. The deck was sandwiched between the toe rail and the sheer plank, leaving the very vulnerable end grain exposed to the elements. All in all, the decks were totally rotten topsides, especially at the toe rails and the junction at the cabin sides. Also, the coaming for the forward hatch was totally wasted away to basically a shell of varnish holding in rotten wood chunks.

Everything at the transom looked okay... none of the varnish was badly blackened indicating water penetration at the hood ends. The hoods themselves were not mitered into the transom planking, but looked and sounded alright.


I started tapping out the hull like maybe a real pro would, feeling for changed in vibration indicating loose planks and listening for dead spots. There was nothing obvious to me, but there were some cracks around plank butts as well as dead sounding spots at the waterline.

Here is me looking like I know what I am going.


The bottom paint appeared to be a hard coating, and was cracking off in a lot of places... there were also areas around the apeature and rudder with obvious delamination of the planking.


This was the single worst spot of damage/deterioration of the hull... a decent sized piece of wood lifting off. The shot is looking aft, so water would really be pushed into the void. I don't know whether this is from an acute source or a slow deterioration.


It did have a very new (>200 hrs) Yannmar diesel, but we didn't try to start it (it was out of the water...)


And also a decent shot of the aft deck... it had a really nice little laz, and if one were so inclined to take the engine out of the hull, this would create lots of excellent usable space.... maybe even a semi-aft cabin area to sit up in?


So, that was a lot of information to process (again, I am only giving my best guesses, I an no pro). It seemed clear that it would not be wise to buy the boat at the full $5,000 price tag, but when Cass called the owner to talk about what we had found out, she learned that he had recently accepted an offer for the full 5k. So it kind of made the decision for her. No boat =[ Sad, but the right decision.

Wow, that was long...