Sailor's Bluffing Bible - Boats For Sale

Book Extract

Buying your own

To mitigate the size of your impending disaster, look first for a second-hand boat. A good tactic is to put yourself in the mindset of the seller – he will inevitably be fed up with the boat, with sailing or even with life itself. So, if you want to buy a racing dinghy a good place to start is at the end of the National Championship, where disgruntled owners naturally blame the boat for their lack of success. If you strike at this moment of maximum gloom you can pick up a good bargain. Similarly, if you want to buy a seagoing yacht, the Spanish city of La Coruna is a good place to begin. This is the first port of call after crossing the Bay of Biscay, one of the roughest bits of sea in the world. After pitching about green-gilled for two or three days without sleep, many owners’ first thought on landing is to get as far away from the sea as possible and their yachts sprout ‘For Sale’ signs quicker than you can say ‘Bargain’.

If this tactic fails you will have to fall back on the ads in the back of sailing magazines, trawl the internet or go to a broker and read the details of the boats on his books. In every case the purple prose makes Estate Agents’ particulars look positively truthful: this is professional bluffing. Deceptively spacious the boat may be, but if the keel bolts are half rusted away or the mast is about to fall down you won’t find that in the blurb. 

Thus, in the spirit of helping fellow sufferers, we offer below some examples to help reading between the lines of these classified adverts.