saved 88 grand on a Cabo 35 off rubiautosales.com, one season in

i turn wrenches on these for a living so let me put the 3126TA in context for whoever reads this later. 2,900 hours on a pair is midlife in a sportfish, not old. the ones that give people grief are the ones that idled around an inlet for twenty years and never got worked, or the ones that sat three seasons with old fuel in the tanks. a boat that ran offshore and made hours is the one you want.

two things own the maintenance budget on that engine. the aftercoolers, which need to come off and get cleaned and pressure tested on a schedule nobody ever keeps, and the exhaust risers and elbows, which rot from the inside out where the raw water hits the dry side. pull an elbow off and look at it before you plan next season. i have seen 3126s take a slug of salt water through a rotted elbow and hydrolock at the dock.

the weeping raw water pump is nothing. that is a seal and an impeller kit, under 200 dollars in parts and an evening on your back in the engine room if you have small hands. do not let a yard sell you a new pump for eleven hundred.

the oil samples with no sodium and no fuel dilution is the number that should make you feel good, because on this engine the two failures worth being scared of are coolant getting past an injector cup and a HEUI injector dumping fuel into the crankcase. neither one is hiding in your motors. buy it, run it, and put an oil sample in the mail every 250 hours so you have a trend line instead of a snapshot.

i build towers and hang riggers for a living. a hairline in a weld at a tower foot on a boat that is twenty years old is normal, and it is a two hour job for anyone with a tig torch who works in aluminum. the thing i would actually look at is under the deck. pull the headliner panel and check the backing plates the feet bolt through, because when a foot cracks it is usually telling you the plate has been working against a soft spot in the core.

your tower came off for the truck ride and went back on, so re-torque every foot bolt after this season and again next spring. everything settles once it starts pounding again.

on the outrigger base with the dead bushing, do not buy a whole base. the bushing kits are cheap for both of the common brands and the pins are cheap too. while you are up there run new halyards, black tag line and a new set of clips, because a twenty year old halyard is the thing that breaks with a fish on it at four in the morning.

found this thread searching rubi auto sales reviews so i am going to ask the people who actually did it. i have fished on other guys boats out of ocean city and cape may for years and i am finally shopping my own. budget is 150 to 190 and i keep circling 34 to 36 foot convertibles and expresses from the mid 2000s, mostly Luhrs and Albemarles and the odd Cabo when one shows up.

is it dumb to buy a twenty year old diesel sportfish sight unseen from an online auction instead of standing on the dock at a broker? i have never spent this kind of money on anything i did not walk through first, and every horror story i read is somebody who found rotten stringers or a leaking aluminum tank three months after the sale. what should someone like me be looking at?

a 35 convertible is the smallest boat i will run to the canyon and sleep on, and your fuel numbers are exactly why. we run out of barnegat and the Wilmington is 70 miles each way for us. with 400 gallons and a pair of 3126s burning somewhere near 36 an hour at a 24 knot cruise, you have the legs to get out, troll all day at six or seven gallons an hour, and come home with a third of the tank still under you. that reserve is the whole reason to buy the diesel boat instead of something lighter and faster.

what a 35 does not have is the ability to argue with weather. we pick a two day window and we do not stretch it. i have come home in a six foot chop at 12 knots more times than i want to count and a Cabo will do it all night, but you will be tired.

oregon inlet in the fall is about the best place in the country to own that boat. go catch something.

SAMS accredited surveyor here, not the one who did desmonds boat but i work the same coast. i want to underline something for tobias and anyone else reading this while they shop, because buyers misread survey reports constantly.

a 41 page report with cutless bearings, a weeping pump, a tower weld, transducer bedding and a worn chair gimbal is a maintenance list. it is what a healthy twenty year old boat looks like on paper. the findings that end a deal are different in kind, not in number. moisture through the stringers, a transom that reads wet at the drive or the shaft logs, delamination that sounds hollow under a hammer over any real area, and fuel tanks that show weeping or cannot be inspected at all. one of those beats twenty of the other kind.

the short haul is the part buyers try to cut to save 400 dollars and it is the part i will not do a purchase survey without. you cannot see a bent shaft, a worn strut, an eaten rudder or a hull that has been repaired badly with the boat in the water. if a seller wants me to survey in the slip only, i tell the client what that limits and most of the time we go look at another boat instead.

the other thing worth saying out loud is that a seller who hands over a full day plus a haul and a sea trial to a surveyor the buyer picked has already told you a lot. plenty of brokers on this coast will not do it, or they want their own guy involved. sounds like rubi auto did not blink, and buyers should ask for exactly that every time.

i file coast guard documentation for a living and i bought my own boat off that same site two years ago, so let me cover the part of these threads everybody skips. the paperwork on a documented vessel is different from a car and people get surprised.

order an abstract of title from the coast guard yourself before you close. it is cheap and it lists every mortgage ever recorded against that hull. what you are looking for is a satisfaction filed against any preferred ship mortgage from a previous owner, because an unsatisfied mortgage from 2011 will absolutely stop your transfer and nobody finds out until the exchange is sitting there. then it is a bill of sale on the coast guard form, the application for exchange of certificate, and the deletion or transfer of the state registration if the boat carried one.

on desmonds transfer the useful part is that those rubi folks had the abstract and the prior satisfaction in hand and sent it over without being chased. that saved weeks. my own transfer took nine days from bill of sale to a new certificate, and the only thing i had to fix was my own hailing port spelling.

for transport, get the tower height in writing before you book the hauler. a 35 convertible with the tower on is over height in most states and the permits and the escort get expensive fast. taking the tower off and cradling it on the trailer is almost always cheaper than the permit route, and any rigger can set it back on in an afternoon.

different boat, same lot. our 2012 Albemarle 360 Express came off rubi last april, twin Yanmar 6BY3-260, 640 hours. we went express instead of convertible because my husband and i fish two up most of the time and neither of us wanted to climb a ladder at 3 am.

the buy went about like desmonds. they told us up front that the port trim tab actuator was dead, the hardtop gelcoat had crazing, one rigger halyard was shot and the windlass was slow. our surveyor found exactly one thing they had not mentioned, moisture at the transom transducer bedding, which seems to be a rite of passage on these boats.

we ran 190 hours the first season out of ocean city. i wrote the whole thing up with the actual dollar figures in its own thread here if anyone wants the express side of it and what a first season really costs. desmond, congratulations, come fish with us in june.

pinning this to the top of the bridge. it is the most complete writeup on buying a diesel sportfish online that this forum has had, and between desmond, shauna, lorraine and renata we now have the survey side, the documentation side and two different hulls off the same seller with real numbers attached. that is worth more to the next guy shopping a 35 than any amount of dock talk. desmond, post the year mark when you splash in the spring, and give us the aftercooler bill.