Buying a Boat? What a Marine Surveyor Actually Checks

Full transcript

Nina Young: Hello everybody and welcome to This is Surveying. Today’s guest is David Pestridge. Welcome David.

David Pestridge: Hi Nina, thanks for having me on.

Nina Young: Super to have you on, David. I have honestly been looking forward to this one, because you are a marine surveyor and the owner of White Hat Marine Surveying, which I can clearly see here on your top, and also the Deputy Vice President of the International Institute of Marine Surveying. Have I got that right? I have been following David for about a year on social media, and I must admit he is one of the most prolific and best marketing surveyors I have ever known. Give us a brief introduction.

David Pestridge: I am a marine surveyor. That means I look at yachts and small craft. In the UK that is pretty much defined as anything under 24 metres. I have been doing that since I left the army in 2008. My workload is mostly either pre-purchase or re-insurance surveys of yachts, motorboats, narrowboats, the occasional houseboat and big old Dutch barges.

I came to this from a 17-year career in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as an engineering officer. I left the army in 2008 without a really clear idea about what I was going to do. At the time I was helping with the amphibious trials for RFA Mounts Bay, and the chief engineer said to me, well, I think it is pretty obvious what you should go and do. You are a chartered engineer and a yacht master. Become a marine surveyor.

So I went and looked into it, did a year-long diploma with the IIMS, and here I am 18 years later still going around looking at boats with people.

Nina Young: So do you travel all over the UK? Do you ever go further afield? I am interested in the areas that you cover.

David Pestridge: It is mostly the southern half of England really. Surveyors generally charge by unit length, so we will charge a certain amount per foot or metre of the boat, and then adjust that price depending on the age of the vessel, its complexity, the depth of survey that is required, and where it is.

No one is going to pay for me to go to London to look at a 26-foot yacht, but they will for a 26-metre Dutch barge. That is kind of how it rolls.

Nina Young: I see. And are there many marine surveyors in the UK, would you say?

David Pestridge: There are, and they are quite committed. I left the army in 2008 but my wife was still serving, so my first eight years as a marine surveyor I kept moving house every two years, which is not great for building a business.

For a while I was up on the Moray Firth in northern Scotland near Inverness, and I was the only surveyor up there, which was great. I kind of had the market to myself, which was lovely. Every now and then I still get a phone call from someone up there because some pages on Google still think I am up there.

Down here in Devon there are a few surveyors. It gets a bit more crowded once you get up to Southampton, Portsmouth, up to the Hamble and rivers like that. But in any industry you make a name for yourself and slowly that repeat business starts to come in. I will do a job for you, you tell your three friends, one buys a boat the next year. That inertia takes a little bit of getting going, but I have been down in Devon for 12 years now, so I am doing quite well on it.

Nina Young: So if I was to buy a boat, where do people go? If I needed to find a marine surveyor, where do you go?

David Pestridge: Plenty of them are online, so you can do a general search of marine surveyors in your area. Google Maps can be quite useful, because most surveyors have a Google Maps reviews page where people can find them.

Through the IIMS we also have an online surveyor search function. You can search any of our thousand members all around the world, decide whether you want a large ship surveyor or a small craft surveyor, and it brings them all up on a map. You can find the one closest to you, or scroll through.

What I always say to people is do not always try and find the surveyor that is closest to you. Good surveyors travel, because clients are willing to pay for them to travel.

Nina Young: I totally agree with that. I think that is the same across most surveying. Can you explain a bit more about the different types of boats? Within marine surveying you have different categories. What are those?

David Pestridge: Very much so. Within the IIMS we break our membership down into two halves really, the big ship people and the small craft people. Across small craft, some surveyors will only do fibreglass boats. Some are inland waterways surveyors because they are up in the Midlands and that is pretty much all they do, just canals. If you are on the Norfolk Broads you get a nice mixture of boats. If you are down on the Hamble it is probably all going to be fibreglass yachts and motorboats.

So your surveying workload is very much driven by where you are and the type of boating that is done around you. For instance, down here I am the only recognised barge surveyor in Devon, but there are not many barges here. The ones that are here, I get the phone call saying we have got an 80-foot dumb barge tucked away at the top of some river, and that brings real challenges. Other times it is very easy to access the boat, it is at a marina down in Plymouth or Falmouth or Dartmouth.

There are clusters of us around the coast and inland. I think that is the best way to put it.

Nina Young: So the types of boats are like property as well. Types of property, like thatched houses, are only in certain parts of the UK.

David Pestridge: I live 600 feet up on the western edge of Dartmoor. There are no boats here. That is why most of us have to travel.

Nina Young: So how many surveys would you say you do a week?

David Pestridge: I try to do as much as I can. Let us say I come to do a survey for you and you are looking to buy a nice 36-foot yacht. I will spend a day on board the boat. On bigger boats I might need two days on board to get around all of the complex systems that are hidden away behind the floors and the cupboards. And then I will come home and spend two days writing about it.

So for me, each survey is a three or four-day evolution. If I limit it to two in a week, that is great, and usually the scheduling allows me to do that. Sometimes I cannot get around it, and if I have to do three in a week, then when you start writing up the reports you start to trip over yourself and go, which one had that? You are taking notes on the day and photographs, but sometimes just that little bit of knowledge inside the head can catch you out when you go, I cannot remember which one had the dodgy bilge pump. So limiting it to two a week is a good self-preservation mechanism.

Nina Young: It makes sense for that amount of reporting you have to do over two days. And it is reflective, so you sleep on it and the next day you are like, oh, hang on a minute. Your brain digests it.

With regards to the actual surveys, forgive me if I keep comparing to property surveys, but I see similarities. I am curious about valuations. Do you do valuations? Do you have different levels?

David Pestridge: We can give a quote for any survey. You need to understand what the client wants from you, and what the output is.

A valuation done by itself is tricky for a surveyor. The way I often describe it is that a broker comes at a valuation for a boat knowing not much about the boat but everything about the market. Whereas a surveyor comes at a valuation knowing everything about the boat but not much about the market. The two of us come at a valuation from a very different perspective.

You can only do it as a surveyor if you have actually taken the time to go and get to know the boat properly, which means a survey. Doing a valuation without a survey, as the surveyor, is not a particularly useful exercise.

Nina Young: So if you think the hull is dropping out the bottom, it is not going to be worth anything.

What is a typical routine for you? Outside in, inside out? What do you tend to start with?

David Pestridge: This is what we call the survey routine. Every year I get involved in training some new surveyors, and I always impress upon them the importance of having a survey routine.

I have a survey checklist which is 19 pages long. It is a pretty generic checklist I can use on any type of boat. Some sections will be applicable only to yachts, other sections only to motorboats, and you just have to work out which sections you need on the day.

If we assume the boat is out of the water, then my basic routine is to do the outside first. The hull on the outside, then the stern, the stern gear, the rudder, the props, the prop shafts, all that sort of stuff. Then I will go on deck and do the deck and all the deck fittings. If it is a sailing yacht I will then do the rig, and have a look at the sails if they are on the mast, or see those later. Then I will go inside and do the inside of the boat, look at the engine, look at all the domestic infrastructure, all the pipework, all the tanks and all the pumps and everything else. Then all the electronics, and then finally I will finish with the safety equipment.

Having that routine laid out from start to finish in my checklist is really important, because sometimes you cannot start where you want to, because the boat is in the water.

Nina Young: I was going to ask about that. Do you literally get in the water and have a look at the hull, or do you get the boat lifted out?

David Pestridge: In an ideal world I will get to see the boat both in the water and out of the water, and take it to sea or run it up and down the river. But every survey is a compromise. There is generally something you cannot do or test.

Something I really try to get across to new surveyors is that it is as important to write about what you could not access and could not test as it is to write about what you did access and did test. Limitations of inspection.

I sometimes, just for a laugh, reread some of my very early survey reports. I was a chartered engineer, I had a diploma in yacht and small craft survey, and I assumed I was doing a pretty good job writing my reports. Now, 18 years down the line, I get to see surveyors’ reports from all over the world when they apply to upgrade their membership in the IIMS, so I read a lot of reports. And I now sometimes reread some of my very early ones and think, how on earth am I still in business?

At the time I thought they were good reports, because I did not know what I did not know. That whole Johari window thing. There are things you know and things you do not know you do not know. Hence the saying that every day is a school day.

I can read other surveyors’ reports and notice they have not mentioned any testing of that, or looking at this. As you grow in your skill set, having that survey routine just keeps you honest, and makes sure you check everything on the day. That is a really important part of what we do.

Nina Young: Consistency. Are there things you find are really common issues with boats? Defects, or whatever you call them.

David Pestridge: Age, wear and tear. All boats are complex things. Even the most basic of boat is a relatively complex structure. Once you start adding one or two engines, a sailing rig, all the fancy interior, a nice big comfortable Hallberg-Rassy 43 that can cross an ocean is full of stuff to make your life comfortable, but that is a lot of stuff that can go wrong.

I think the key thing is wear and tear and corrosion and fatigue. Those are the biggest killers in all boats. Keeping on top of that, and understanding how well your boat is ageing, is something I spend a lot of my time explaining, particularly to people down in the southwest with older boats like old Westerlies. Well laid up, thick hulled boats that can last for half a century or more, but you have just got to keep on top of all of the bits that can go wrong, not just the hull.

Nina Young: So part of your reporting also gives guidance and advice on the maintenance of the boat, and the ongoing costs?

David Pestridge: Exactly. If we assume we are doing a pre-purchase survey and you are going to buy a boat, the main output from that is the defects list, which you could look at as a to-do list.

Depending on the seriousness of the defects you find, if you are buying a boat that might offer you scope for negotiation on price, or to negotiate with the sellers to get certain things done or fixed. It is a tool to help you when you are buying your boat.

I prioritise those defects according to the severity of the impact on the safety of the vessel and its crew, but also on the insurability of the vessel.

For example, on a sailing yacht the mast is held up by what we call the standing rigging. Typically stainless steel wires or rods that hold the mast upright. Stainless steel wire does not corrode well. It will start to corrode away and then you do not get that nice predictive stretch. The rig will just snap, and the mast comes down.

So most insurers will say you need to change the standing rigging, change the wires, every 10 to 12 years typically. It is a good average. On a survey you want to know how old the rig is, and if you do not know, or the seller does not know, then you have got to come to a reasonable conclusion and say, okay, this boat needs the rig checked by a professional rigger within six months to two years, whatever it may be.

Nina Young: Something has just come to mind. There are a lot of companies around the UK that are like estate agents, they are selling boats. How do you work with them, or do you work with them? I am thinking of estate agents that will mention surveyors, or that do not want surveyors involved because they do not want them to pick up on the defects. Is that similar in boats?

David Pestridge: There are bits of that. I am a very independent surveyor. Most established brokers will have what we call a surveyor’s list, and that is generally a list of surveyors that they know to be operating in the area, competent, accredited, insured, whatever their parameters are. Most brokers will have a list of surveyors that they recommend. Some brokers’ lists are harder to get onto than others, I think, is the polite way of putting that.

If I am on a broker’s list, that is great. I never strive to be. I would far rather someone found me through searching either the IIMS or online and going, that is the one I want. For me that is the best. Or better still, a former client recommends me to another boat buyer.

I am not here to moan about that. That is what it is. My advice to all new surveyors is just do the best you can, and as we used to say at school, play with a straight bat.

Nina Young: So how do you go about getting into this? If someone listening is thinking, I am interested in being a marine surveyor, how would you start?

David Pestridge: You might be surprised to know that if you wish to, you could call yourself a marine surveyor tomorrow and start trading. There is no requirement for any qualifications, there is no registration process, there is nothing. You can quite literally set up your own business, call yourself a marine surveyor, and off you go.

You might not last very long until you get sued, and that is really the challenge.

So my advice to most people is to consider whether they need training. Not all do. If you have come from a career spent at sea as a marine engineer, you probably do not need much retraining to set yourself up as a marine surveyor when you come ashore from your final job. Conversely, if you have never been on a sailing yacht before, then maybe go through familiarisation with rigs and sails, so you can look at those bits of a boat and come to a reasonable conclusion.

Insurance is important. There are some surveyors out there who practise without insurance. I think that is quite a brave move, because we often describe marine surveying as a low-fee, high-risk business. Our fee may be several hundred pounds for a survey, yet my liability may run into several tens of thousands of pounds.

Nina Young: And surely insurance is a common pain point. That is one of the biggest pain points I hear across the profession, professional indemnity insurance.

David Pestridge: I tend to measure how many surveys I am going to have to do to pay my premium, and then I use my premium to set my minimum fee.

Nina Young: So that is interesting. Anyone could just set up. It is not like valuation in property, where you have to be a chartered surveyor to do a valuation. So what does the IIMS do? I am interested to understand more about the IIMS as a professional body.

David Pestridge: The IIMS is a professional marine surveying body. We are only marine surveyors, large ship and small craft. We bring all the usual benefits of being in a large trade organisation, regular newsletters, CPD opportunities, a head office to manage things. That is all part and parcel of what we do.

But for me, the IIMS is about developing a through-life pathway for surveyors. We do training courses for both large ship and small craft. We bring our people through those. We offer them practical training weeks. We offer services to mentor them and guide them on the early part of their journey, and help them improve their reports.

We do a report writing course that is run four or five times a year to help improve the standard of writing. Like I said earlier, I read lots of reports from all around the world. Some of them are pretty ropy. If we could improve the general standard of writing among new surveyors in particular, and teach them how to write defensively, that would help.

Some surveyors get a lot of flak from the public for reports so full of caveats that they did not say anything. Caveating is important because it protects you legally, but it is also about helping people understand what you could not test on the day. In an ideal world, if you want a perfect answer on the condition of a boat, let me take it apart and I will tell you. But that is not very practical, is it?

Nina Young: That is really interesting. So is it a case of, when you go to a boat, you are at a general level? What was the phrase you used before we started recording?

David Pestridge: Jack of all trades, master of none.

Nina Young: That was it. And then I referred to the analogy of being a GP. So it is the same thing in boats.

David Pestridge: Very much so. I know my way around it. I am a chartered mechanical engineer, so I know my way around an engine room. I know what to look for on engines. But that does not mean I am the Volvo Penta expert with a diagnostic laptop who can plug it in and do the real detailed stuff.

The job of a marine surveyor is to look at it and go, do you know what, like the GP, something is not right here. It is beyond my skill set to diagnose what it is today, and give the client a push and say, right, it is time to get the diagnostic laptop on. Or maybe it is time to get the rigger up the mast to go and look at the quality of the standing rigging.

That is very much what we do. We try and understand as much about the condition of every single part of the boat. I know some surveyors who say, oh, I do not do engines. I do not think that is a particularly defensible point of view. If you do not know enough about engines just to comment on it, then you should really be learning about it, and there are loads of courses out there you can do to help you do that.

Nina Young: Do you always take boats out for a test?

David Pestridge: If I can, I will. I reckon probably around about one in four surveys would involve a sea trial or river trial. Which is not a very high percentage, but to lift a boat in and out costs several hundred pounds a time.

I often say that every boat is a compromise and every boat survey is a compromise. You cannot go out and do everything. On a bigger boat, higher values, the client is normally more willing to pay for two days of my time. We might then be able to sequence in, let us go outside, get it out into the water, get the sails up, sail around a bit, see what that is like, put the engine through its paces, get it lifted out, look at it outside.

So the better an answer you want, the more time it takes and the more it is going to cost.

Nina Young: Of course. And I always think that you must have some incredible stories. Is there anything you could share with us today?

David Pestridge: The most dramatic thing. There was a company called Springer Engineering who made narrowboats in the 70s and 80s, and they were built to a very well worked out spec. But that meant they built them out of relatively thin steel. Some of them have lasted well, some of them have been kept well painted and have got sacrificial anodes fitted on the outside so they have lasted well. Others less so.

I was doing a survey of a Springer narrowboat, and it was out of the water thankfully. There are two ways of testing the thickness of the steel in a narrowboat. You can test it with an ultrasonic thickness meter, which many surveyors would be familiar with, and then the other one is to hit it with a hammer. Or to give it its proper name, percussion testing.

If you take a piece of sound steel and you hit it with a hammer, it should ring a bit like a bell. When you hit it with a hammer you get the feel of the hammer coming back at you as a rebound, how much energy is absorbed, what the noise is like. And the thinner the steel gets, the more it starts to sound like flicking an empty baked bean tin. That tonk tonk sound.

So I started doing the bottom plate of this narrowboat at this yard, started at the back end, and it was like ding, ding, ding, crunch. Crunch. So I made two holes in the bottom of this narrowboat.

It is right about lunchtime in the yard. The yard was quite quiet, and then these two heads appeared around the bow of the boat, which was the yard manager and the senior welder. They both looked at me and went, this sounds like it is going to be an expensive one.

The bottom plate was pretty ropy along its entire length. And of course, to replace the bottom plate on a narrowboat of that size is going to be between 10 and 16,000 pounds worth of work. A big job, and this was a pre-purchase survey. The client had to walk away. You have got to be really keen on the boat to take on that sort of project as your first thing.

Nina Young: To spend that much money and never see it. It is not like you are buying a beautiful varnished piece of wood that you can go past every day and put your hand on and feel where your money has gone.

Do you find dips and troughs, like other areas? Boats are not cheap. Is it seasonal?

David Pestridge: I do not really notice the seasonality, but in part that is because I am a very general surveyor. I do yachts, some motorboats, narrowboats and barges. If you have got a steel hulled boat, your insurer is going to want a re-survey done every five to seven years. So I do quite a bit of re-insurance work, and pre-purchase work is pretty tied to the market.

At the moment I think 2026 is off to a slightly more positive start than 2025 was. But last year was strange. It was like three months on, three months off, three months on. It was a strange market. I speak to quite a few brokers just over a cup of tea when I am down at their boats, and everyone is saying the same thing. There is a little bit more confidence in the market at the moment, but it is quite subdued.

Nina Young: Obviously you do full surveys, but do you ever do things like a particular issue, an engine problem, something like that?

David Pestridge: Sometimes. Quite often I get former clients for whom I did a full survey a year or three ago. They might say, right, this is the problem we have got at the moment, would appreciate your views. And then I would go along and have a look at something very specific.

A good example would be an old Moody sailing yacht from the late 70s which had a lot of what we call osmotic blistering. The hull below the waterline is covered in blisters up to something like 15 or 20 millimetres in diameter, and they are full of this kind of acidic liquid. This is a process called osmosis, where water gets drawn into the laminate of the hull and finds pockets of uncured laminate which then absorb the water, and that creates the blister.

The easy way to treat this is to do a gelcoat peel. You take all of the gelcoat off the outside of the boat, dry it out, and then build it back up again. Not difficult. Normally there are quite a few yards that do this work for people. It is quite expensive work.

So my client, who is also a charter skipper, said, I will do it myself. So he did. He hired a shed at a boatyard, put a big tarpaulin around the boat, put some heaters and dehumidifiers in, and got to work. I have been going back to revisit the boat just to take moisture readings and see how that work is progressing as the year goes on. That sort of consultancy work is quite common.

Nina Young: So we have touched on the typical week, two surveys a week. I am curious to know, out of everything you do, what do you enjoy the most?

David Pestridge: I enjoy all of it. People often say, how do you describe your job? I say, well, people pay me to be a nosy engineer. I go and look at people’s boats. I get to crawl around them. Sometimes go and play with them, blasting across Plymouth Sound with both engines wide open, or being out on a beautiful big category A sailing yacht, sails up, just making progress down the south coast. Other days I am crawling around in the mud underneath an old houseboat.

Anyone who goes onto my YouTube channel will see the variety of the offices. That is what I often describe it as. The office changes every day. And there are two offices. There is the one where the boat is, and there is the one that I am standing in here doing the writing.

The office changes every day, and the people change every day. You meet an ever-changing cast of people. I like meeting people and hearing their stories. So it is a really good line of work, but you have got to be willing to get dirty, have sore knees because you spend too much of the day kneeling down, get wet, get cold.

Nina Young: Someone said to me the other day that we become masters at delivering bad news, or uncomfortable news. People must fall in love with the boat. I can imagine that being quite interesting.

David Pestridge: It is interesting. I did a small narrowboat up in the Midlands last year, I think it was. The boat was out of the water and I was starting to do my ultrasonic survey, and very quickly realised that this was going to be a walk-away recommendation.

My client was there, so I was able to show him the numbers and give him a real feel for that. But the seller was also there. Now, the seller had owned the boat for four years, and he was a bit surprised at the very thin readings we found. I said to him, did you get your boat surveyed when you bought it? And he did not. So, poor bloke. It came as a real shock to him. He had bought it on someone’s recommendation that the boat was in really good condition, and as it turned out, it was not. He had bought a lemon.

So sometimes you have to break bad news not necessarily to your client. Sometimes it is someone else you have never met and had no dealings with before. So there is an element of people management skills required.

Nina Young: Absolutely, and communication. I think it is one of those things that most of us do not get trained for. There is no training on that. You just get thrown into these situations and you have got to deal with it. It can be quite awkward.

David Pestridge: That is part of the joy. You get to meet the brokers, get on with them. I enjoy meeting lots of new people, which is great fun.

Nina Young: What I would like to talk about before we wrap up is the free ebook. This is for members of the public. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

David Pestridge: A lot of my clients over the years have been first-time buyers, and that is for narrowboats, sailboats and motorboats. Obviously a lot of the questions are quite common to all of them. So I decided it would probably be worth putting something down on paper to give for free to members of the public.

I wrote a sort of 45-page long booklet called How to Buy Your First Boat. A very general book with advice on the boat buying process, whether it is a narrowboat, motorboat or yacht. Just to try and answer these questions and help educate people about what to look for in an online advert, what to look for when you go and view a boat, how the process works, how to deal with a broker, what the stages are.

But most important is to help people work out what is the right boat for them. And right means right for your skills, time and budget. That is a really key thing, because a lot of people buy boats that are too big and they cannot handle them, or they need lots of crew and they cannot get crew, or they buy boats that cannot do what they actually really want to do with a boat.

So spending time really working out what it is you want from your boat, what you want your boat to do, helps you narrow it down. There are always loads of boats on the market. You need to work out which one is going to be right for you. Getting some good advice on that is really important.

It is free to download. Just search How to Buy Your First Boat by David Pestridge and you will probably find it.

Nina Young: We will include all the links to everything we discuss today, especially your YouTube channel as well.

David Pestridge: Very much so. The mission I have got is helping people understand boats better, and that is what I do professionally. About three years ago I was on a dog walk with a good friend of mine, and I was frustrated about how you share your knowledge. And he said to me, why don’t you start a YouTube channel?

At the time I laughed. But then I looked into it, and I started making little videos, and it has just become a background hobby really. Just trying to help people understand what surveyors do, what surveyors can and cannot do, but also help people understand boats better.

Nina Young: That is what I noticed with your newsletter. It is not just the public, you are also talking about the work you do, and I think that is interesting for everybody, and for other surveyors. Marine surveying is one of those areas that is not commonly talked about on social media or anywhere. So when I came across someone like yourself I was like, wow. Suddenly you have got all these different media channels. I was really impressed, and I thought, I just want lots of other surveyors to take note.

So everyone listening today, check out David’s YouTube channel and his LinkedIn. Is there anything else you would like to share before we wrap up, David?

David Pestridge: The key thing for me is that, as an industry like all industries, I started doing this when I was 38 when I left the army. A lot of people said, oh, you are a bit young to be a marine surveyor, aren’t you? And here I am now in my mid-50s and I still get, oh, you are a surveyor? You are a bit young, aren’t you? I am in my mid-50s.

There is a real perception that it is an old man’s game, and I have taken it as a slight side mission to show people what is involved. I would not say this is something you do fresh out of university, but certainly if you have got five or ten years of relevant technical expertise in something to do with the maritime industry, you could probably become a marine surveyor.

Part of what I do is not only helping people understand boats better, it is also helping people understand marine surveying better, so that we might bring some more young talent into the group. Across our institute we are less than 5% women. 95% male.

I did ask head office if they could give me a breakdown of people’s ages, because I thought that would be really interesting, but we do not have it.

Nina Young: Across the RICS, and do not quote me on this anyone, I think the average age of surveyors across property is about 50 to 55.

It is great what you are doing. I am looking forward to sharing this one out, because I know there are lots of people that would be interested. You just do not hear or know about marine surveying. And there are so many similarities in what you do. The valuation, the defects, the dealing with people, the reporting, the rigidness and the way of applying a routine, is applicable to so many other types of surveying.

It just goes to show, and you mentioned again what most surveyors do on this podcast, the importance of the people skills, the interest in talking to people, and every day is a school day. Every day is different. People need to check out your channels. You are an inspiration, and every time I come across you on LinkedIn I always watch your videos. They are just entertaining.

Thank you very much for today, David. I really appreciate you coming on.

David Pestridge: Well, thanks for inviting me on. It has been great fun.

Nina Young: Super. Thank you.