Hours, compression and impeller wear: what to ask before you bid on a repo jet boat at m&a

none of that is dumb. hours first: on the Yamaha 1.8 boats a dealer can plug in and read the hours from each engine's ECM, including how many of those hours were spent at high rpm. a screen photo is a good start, the ECM is the real answer. you will not get an ECM read before bidding on a repo, so treat the screen photo as the number and then check it against wear you can see in the photos, the seat vinyl, the swim platform mat, the ladder. 90 hours and a cracked helm seat in a boat that lived under a cover do not match.

compression: on a boat sitting in a lender yard that only happens if you hire somebody local and it gets arranged ahead. ask the m&a people if that can be done before the close and who pays for it. do not assume either way.

for the impeller, ask for a photo straight up through each grate with a flashlight held next to the lens, not the phone flash. the flash bounces off the grate and you see nothing. you want the leading edges of the blades edge on. a smooth rounded corner is ordinary wear. a bright curl or a nick is rocks. marco's was a curl and it was a file and an evening, so do not walk away from a boat over that alone.

what i would walk away from is a crack in the pump housing or a deep gouge across the bottom of the wear ring. that is not a file job.

colby, from somebody who just did this: ask for exactly what you want to see, nobody gets offended. i asked for the pumps, the engine hatch open, the transom and the trailer tires and got all of it by email. the one thing i forgot to ask for was the date code on the trailer tires, and that cost me 310.

salt or fresh, ask where it was registered last and look for crust on the hose clamps in the engine hatch photo. mine was Florida and had crust. the M&A Auto Sales listing never said fresh or salt and i doubt they would know, it is the lender's boat, they just broker it.

one nobody has said yet: ask how long it has been sitting. a boat that has been in a yard since last fall has old fuel, likely a dead battery, maybe dried out seals. none of that is expensive, but budget a battery, a fuel stabilizer, and a fresh tank of gas before the first run. and look at the date stamps on the listing photos if they have them, sometimes those pictures are months old.