This is how much it cost to fix our hurricane damaged boat - episode 8

the prices and cost of repair for hurricane damaged boats very hugely from one case to another the purpose of this video is to provide an insight into our particular experience only we are not hurricane boat experts we are simply sharing our story [Music] hey guys welcome to episode eight eight episodes means we've been going for eight weeks in that time we've had so many questions about how much the boat cost us how much were the repairs blah blah blah so we've decided that we're going to share this information with you guys we were a bit reluctant to do so it's this is kind of personal information and and I know my life savings is involved here but this seems to be a huge interest in it so we've decided to to go ahead and do this episode so I've been working on super yachts for the last ten years in the second half of my career I became a chief engineer and was earning quite good money so although I pushed a lot of it up against the wall I managed to save a fair bit and that was my contribution towards this boat so I moved to Costa Rica and that's where I met Ben Zuba he's the Navy SEAL that you've seen in all the episodes so far we became business partners and started talking about buying a boat we knew what kind of boat we wanted and we knew we wanted a four cabin catamaran that was around the 45-foot range so I started a little engineering company in Costa Rica and Ben and I were working together so we became really good friends and while we were working we met a the owner of a shipyard down there and he was fine de saint-martin to look at hurricane damaged boats after Hurricane Omar and that's didn't even occur to us to even go down that route but after speaking with him he was like there's so many deals you got to get over there was speaking to Gary from BV our yacht sales about it and he just said guys you got it you got to come here and you got to see see this for yourself this is nothing you've ever seen before the place has been destroyed but this boats going to cheap so we both bought a ticket and you bought a two-week ticket to Tortola in the BVI's the rest is history so when we got to the BVI we couldn't believe what we were dealing with that was absolutely destroyed as you're flying in to Tortola boats were just part on top of each other and it was it was like something out of a movie there was just destruction everywhere so we went straight to Gary's office and met with him and he started showing us boats so what what we saw was boats from that were being given away for free up to two three hundred thousand dollars in everything in between there were hardly any boats that still had their rigging up so I mean the hurricane had winds of 280 miles an hour so for us personally we narrowed it down to two boats it was a lagoon 440 at 2009 that was asking $120,000 because it still had the rigged up and this boat which was asking 220,000 dollars its it also had the rigged up it had only been sunk on one side the green 440 both holes had been underwater so what we ended up doing was putting an offer in for the 440 the 2009 440 at $85,000 so I got a survey involved Jeff who kindly had a look at the boat and he went right through it and he stuck his head into places which I didn't even think to look and he said don't buy this boat the bowl kids were coming away from the hull and now we're up and behind the cabins and stuff in places that you couldn't get to without ripping the whole cabins apart so for $85,000 by price we would have had to put so much work into getting that boat seaworthy again so he took his advice and decided not to buy that boat and turned our attention onto this boat they were asking 220,000 dollars we tried to global it and the 130s and the 140s and they got rejected so we ended up buying the boat for a hundred fifty seven thousand dollars I went right through it with a fine-tooth comb and only one side had been underwater so I knew that whole starboard side was okay that's where most of the electrics are to be honest so when we took everything into consideration we thought that was a good deal and we bought the boat so before we bought the boat I made up this Excel spreadsheet here with the cost estimation of how much all the repairs were going to be so this is a really important part when buying at any boat I think is to do a proper budget so I I wrote down all of the systems on a boat and then I estimated or I went to channel Aries or I spoke to contractors and I got the estimated amount that all the repairs would cost so what I did was every time I bought something that was for the boat I put it into this spreadsheet which is expenses and wrote down what the expense was how much it was and what category it came under and the budget estimate so I'd put them back into the budget X budget estimation here and I would it would give me how much money I saved according to my estimate so the final figures as of today we've spent twenty two thousand nine hundred and nineteen dollars for the repairs I had a big budget here for for fibreglass repairs it ended up costing us 2,200 these seven dollars and that's just the materials but I don't know anything about fiberglass or or rigging or anything like that so there's a massive learning curve but so a huge part of our success I guess is that we met the right people and and they pointed us in the right direction and gave us good advice so the whole time been my business partner was overseas working so the amount of trust that he gave me I'll be forever grateful for that I guess a huge part of doing a project like this would be it would be had too hard to do on your own in my opinion you need you need the support from people in my support was Ben and at times I wanted to give up I was doubting myself so I was doing this all on my own for the first month and it was it was overwhelming the amount of fibreglass work and and everything like that I didn't know if the boat was gonna sink at any moment I'm not a professional at this I don't know I didn't really know what I was doing so I knew the I left the engines and everything till last cause I knew that was going to be okay and we tried to get stuck into all the fiberglass work and that but yeah would I I couldn't have done it without Ben so another person that helped me and going back to like having a team of people around you good friend of mine Benji French guy that you've seen in the other episodes he flew from France he quit his job and leased out his apartment and stuff and he flew over to give me a hand so for the last two months he was there with me working every day we were doing fiberglass work he's another guy I'll be forever grateful for for helping me I couldn't have done it without him as well so I guess I was fortunate to have been Zuber backing me from overseas and we need to sit decision I made he just had full faith and full trust in the decisions I was making and then Benji came and saved me by lending me a hand so just back to the budget side of things there's still a huge amount of work to do so that $22,000 or whatever it was that's up till now and I've got a lot a lot more money that we need to put into it so at the moment we're all in for one hundred and eighty thousand dollars and the boat I don't really know what the boats worth one of these that hasn't been through hurricanes probably worth about 400 to 500 thousand dollars so I think we're we're gonna we're not gonna lose money on it unless I sink it I don't really know the answer to that but the insurance companies that I have spoken to have said that I will have no problem getting insurance as long as I get a thorough out of water survey so I don't actually have insurance on this boat right now I know I won't pass an insurance survey at the moment but yeah you might think I'm crazy I probably am crazy but yeah I'll get insurance as soon as I can plus the added expense so I'm more I'm invested fully in this and I'm still figuring out how to make make money to sustain this lifestyle because one thing about buying a hurricane them suppose that you've just got money pouring out constantly every day something else is going wrong so I've got to find the way to balance this lifestyle but we'll figure something out so after we bought the boat we got a bill of sale here this is the u.s. Coast Guard version we also got a bill of sale this is I think this is more of an international version and on top of that we've got a warranty of title so we didn't actually get a title we got a warranty of title and with these documents I registered to vote in the United States we're at Delaware so that we're really good really quick I don't have a title but the the brokers and a lot of people have spoken to you've ever sure been a bill of sale is all you really need to sell the boat again so I hope that's gonna work it's not an option for us to sell this boat so this is our home and we're gonna keep enjoying the sailing lifestyle for as long as we can so just through my personal experience I think there's a few things that you need to consider if you're gonna buy one of these things it's whether you can do the work yourself we need to get contractors to do it so from what I've seen and in my opinion if you need to get contractors to do all the work it's not worth it if you're willing to put in the time and the effort to do it yourself and that's when you can get a good deal so I've told you what we're in a for and we've got a boat that's worth a lot more than that so that was our goal and we reached our goal but some other things to consider our flights in and out of these places and then your accommodation and food while you're there so BVI is not cheap you have to budget that into your plans I spent four months there fixing this boat so it's been a lot of money on food some other expenses will be getting surveys done whether the boat needs to be salvaged or towed a lot of the boats were like still under water so there's a big expense involved in that and then we finished the rest of the work and saint-martin which is way cheaper in my opinion and I would go there if I did this all again another expense which we lucked out on again was we didn't have to pay any dockage so I've got a friend who had to haul his boat out there he was paying 260 dollars a day or something for a lagoon 450 so that would have ruined us as well so we had good luck on our side for the whole the whole experience to be honest we get this question all the time and the honest answer is I don't know I haven't been there for a few months now as I was working on our boat I was hearing of less and less deals and saying that I picked one up for $3,000 and sold at five days later for 12,000 who was in here 143 I got a cheap of a friend that I made there and yeah that was a quick quick flip so there there are still deals but I honestly don't know and again the only read the only way you're really gonna find out is to go there you see the hurricane boats everywhere they're just all over the place some of them are still underwater you see a half a mast sticking up but you don't know who owns them so that's the hard part is finding out who owns them we just wanted a nice boat that we could that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford so that was the that was our goal and we've achieved it in my eyes but whether there's any deals left I'm not sure if god forbid there's no more hurricanes because the destruction that we saw was next level and I wouldn't wish that on any any Island a lot of people wonder if they can do it and the answer is yes anyone can do it there's nothing special about us the only thing you really need to dedicate to this is there's time and money you've got those things going for it so I hope you enjoyed that a little bit of information again I'm not an expert that's just my opinion we're just getting so many questions that I thought we should address it so from here on we're gonna continue to do the the cruising episodes but we're also gonna because there's so much work still to do I'm looking at my solar panel right now and it's got a timber frame rather than a stainless one because I couldn't afford to stay in this one so there's a lot of work coming up to do I wouldn't recommend doing that by the way but yeah moving forward we're gonna keep doing the sailing episodes and more sort of how-to episodes I guess how to fix things so I hope you enjoyed it and see you next week [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sailing Parlay Revival

Views: 760,604

Keywords: hurricane damaged boats, salvage boats, boat repair, how to fix fibreglass, how much is hurricane damaged boat, hurricane irma, sailing channel, sailing la vagabonde, sailing delos, sailing, cruising caribbean, cost to fix hurricane damaged boat, hurricane damaged boats for sale, hurricane damaged catamaran, sailing uma, sailing doodles, sailing zatara, yacht life productions, yacht life, lagoon catamaran, lagoon 450, catamaran for sale

Id: vNN16R3S4lI

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 21 2018