My sleep was impacted by worry about the boat survey for days beforehand.
When you buy a boat a deposit is paid to the broker subject to survey who then takes it off sale, the deposit can be a little as a few pounds to a whopping 10% of the agreed purchase price, ours was a flat £500 irrespective of the purchase price, you then have a short time, generally 14 days, to arrange a survey. If the survey reveals significant problems you can try to renegotiate the selling price or withdraw from the deal, but and it is a big but, if you withdraw you loose your deposit, and the cost of slipping the boat (taking it out of the water) we had a special deal price of £100 for slipping and the cost of the survey was £635 so picking an lemon could cost us £1235 with nothing to show for it.
Now you know why I was worrying ’cos however close I looked, however many times I squinted into cupboards and little spaces, I am still the equivalent of a “know nothing” car buyer kicking a tyre - a “know nothing” boat buyer kicking a life ring.
A surveyor, in our case Tom, brings skill, experience and specialist tools to the job and never needs to kick, sometimes he brings very bad news if the boat you have set your heart on turns out to be a badly maintained potential money pit with a hull worn paper thin.
Out of the waterand ready for the all important survey
Ultra sound is used to reveal the hull steel thickness at a number of points throughout the base and sides of the hull. RoJo’s original thickness was 10mm for the baseplate and 6mm for the sides, the ultrasound recorded thickness between 9.8mm and 9.9mm for the hull, 5.8mm to 5.9mm for the sides - result!! They say narrow boating is a contact sport and the scars on the hull sides would attest to this but the surveyor assures us they will disappear when the hull is next blacked.
5.9mm hull side, 9.9mm baseplate. Rusty areas will be machine
cleaned and chemically rust treated before the hull is blacked.
The header tank for the central heating was cracked and needs replacing as does the cap to the engine header tank, neither much of a problem nor that the galley tap leaks and needs replacing or rewashing.
There were five items that failed the Boat Safety Scheme inspection and without a BSS Certificate (the narrowboat equivalent of a MOT) you cannot get insurance and without insurance you can’t get a CRT licence and without a CRT licence you cannot use or put your boat on the English and Welsh canal systems. Fortunately all of the BSS faults are minor and easily corrected.
Everything else was cosmetic and will, hopefully, prevent problems further down the line -clean and paint the water tank with potable bitumen paint, clean and paint the engine bay, clean and paint the gas locker. Any paint job on a metal narrowboat it can be likened to painting the Fourth Rail Bridge and these were already on my “to do” list after deciding they needed doing following my kicking exercises.
Engine and engine bay - scruffy and in need of cleaning and painting but still sound.
“ . . . . a good boat with little to do to bring it to a good condition, certainly worth the asking price, a boat you could actually set out on today without worry . . . . “ was his final verdict.
Once we have the survey in writing we will pay the broker, he can pay the vendor and we can sail away into the sunset.