Well, I sympathize with your pain. When we were boat shopping about 2
years ago, we went through a cycle of offers of about a dozen boats and
surveys on 3.

Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:
..... I
put in an offer which was accepted and I arranged with a surveyor of
some experience to look at the boat and sea trial it.

Well, let's just say that about three minutes into the survey, he
found one bad prop, the other was marginal, the rudders were pigeon
toed, there were holes where the transducers and speedo were removed,
there were stress cracks along the bottom chines....(brevity snip)...
Oh well, it was worth the money I paid to at least learn a lesson in
how it's done when it's done right. Worth every penny.

It *is* worth the money... think about how expensive it would be to try
and fix all that stuff after you bought the boat.

Don't take it as a knock on your own knowledge... you haven't spent all
day every day, working at learning about technical details & how to spot
problems. I bet the surveyor appreciated your inspection and spent less
time gazing at flaws you already spotted, freeing him up for other stuff.

The next expensive (not to mention heartbreaking) lesson is that
surveyors *always* miss stuff. A really good surveyor will miss fewer
and less important/expensive things.

Fair Skies
Doug King