'SECOND-HAND: THE GOOD, BAD AND THE UGLY'

When Simon and Sally Hardaker set out with friends to buy a boat suited to long-distance cruising they encountered a tricky second-hand market considerably changed in recent times

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For much of the past decade, my wife Sally and I have been dreaming, planning and saving up to sail off on an adventure, together with our friends of the last 25 years, Nigel and Catherine Langhorn. Like many, the long and sometimes painful process of searching for a boat began online, before talking to brokers and finally, going and looking at boats.

We encountered several challenges in the second-hand market, the first among these being availability. Since the UK left the EU, purchasing a boat in Europe whatever your cruising plans) and bringing it back to sail in the UK makes you liable for 20% VAT on the purchase price. Unless you can stretch your budget, that leaves you searching in the UK; a fairly small pool as we were to discover.

The internet is a marvel for yacht research, but still relies on yacht brokers entering the details accurately and keeping them up-to-date. For the last couple of years, the market has been hot:

Good boats come on the market one day and are snapped up the next, sometimes even before listing. We experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of buying a boat over the last year.

THE BAD: BOAT ONE First, we found a great heavy displacement Contest 48 that looked sea-kindly. The boat was ketch-rigged; I saw this as providing some flexibility in sailplan, but you could not argue with the alternative view that there was twice as much rigging to replace when the time came. She was well looked after and upgraded, but had a teak deck in dire need of replacement – a probable deterrent to prospective buyers. We researched the options for repair and offered a price to reflect that.