SPECIAL REPORT
RUPERT HOLMES ON SMOOTH HANDOVERS: OWNERS’ ADVICE AND AVOIDING PROBLEMS WITH NEW YACHTS
Buying a brand new yacht ought to be one of the best experiences of a lifetime. However, the reality is different for a small number of owners. So how can prospective boat buyers avoid unforeseen problems?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to believe that the experience of buying a new yacht is never problematic? But as with anything and everything – from cars to new homes – problems with new yachts are by no means unheard of. Stories of keels falling off, bulkheads buckling, bond failure of structural components and so on have all had significant exposure on social media and YouTube. But how much truth is there to them? What are boatbuilders doing to address the problems? And how can buyers best protect themselves?
Fortunately the issues new boat buyers are most likely to encounter fall into the ubiquitous category of snagging a (albeit potentially long) list of relatively minor issues. Almost no new boat is without them, which is partly a reflection of the marine industry’s small scale production compared to sectors such as automotive. Yachts are still largely built and assembled by hand, which inevitably means there’s potential for error to creep into production processes, which makes effective quality control procedures essential.
SNAGGING TIMESCALE
Snagging procedures vary considerably between different yards, although in many cases
