2022 Bennington 23 SSBX tritoon, blind bid through Lake Park Auto Connection

34,200. that is what i put in the box, and in june a semi with a boat on a trailer came down our road and dropped off a 2022 Bennington 23 SSBX with a Yamaha F150 and 218 hours on it. i have wanted to write this up somewhere all summer and this board opened at the right time.

the boat before it was a 2005 Lowe Trinidad, twin tubes, 75 Mercury two stroke, bought off a guy in Vergas in 2013. fine boat. the kids are 11 and 14 now, they want to be pulled, and that motor could barely get one of them out of the water.

i shopped the normal way first. a 2021 or 2022 SSBX with under 300 hours was 46 to 52 at the dealers between Detroit Lakes and Alexandria last winter. private party on marketplace, one came up at 41 in March and it was gone before i finished reading the post. i was ready to give up for a year.

in february i was up at midnight typing repossessed pontoon into google and ended up at lakeparkautoconnection.com, which turned out to be twenty five minutes from my mother in law's house. they are a broker. the boats are bank repos and they sit at whatever secure lender yard they were pulled to, they never come to Minnesota until somebody buys one. this one was at a facility outside Grand Rapids, Michigan.

the part that took me two weeks to get my head around: the bidding is sealed. you put in one number, you never see anybody else's, and high number takes it. no bid war, no watching a clock, no chance to go one more. and no buyer's premium, which i assumed was a trick until the invoice came and it was 34,200 with nothing added.

listing had 61 photos. HIN plate, the hour readout on the Yamaha gauge, both gates, under the console, a close shot of every tube weld, and a video of it running on the muffs with somebody trimming it up and down. i asked for shots of the underside and got them in a day and a half.

i did not want to bid on photos so i hired a marine surveyor in Grand Rapids. 425 dollars. the outfit in lake park gave me the yard's name and number and told me the buyer arranges it and the buyer pays for it, which is fair. his report: tubes straight, no dents below the waterline, one scuff on the port nose cone from a dock, compression even across all four, 218 hours confirmed on the gauge, one gate latch broken, and the bimini boot missing.

bid on a monday, found out i won on a wednesday, wired thursday. boat showed up on day 12. the title and the lien release were their own headache and i am still not sure i understand the hauling side, so somebody who has done this more than once please jump in. ask me things.

first_toon_kevin wrotethe bottom half of the tubes, the part that would be underwater, is the part nobody can photograph well and the part that would have the dent in it. how did your surveyor actually see under there.

good question and it is the one i asked too, because a tube with a crease in the bottom is a boat that lists and never stops listing.

three things got me there. the yard had it on a trailer with the bunks under the outside tubes, so the entire center tube was hanging in the air and he could photograph the whole bottom of it, welds and all. for the two outer ones he went down flat on a creeper with a light and a phone on a stick and got the bottom of each one in sections, and where a bunk was in the way he moved along and shot around it. and then he did the dumb simple test that i would not have thought of, he had the yard guy put a level across the deck fore and aft and across the beam. a boat with a crushed or leaking tube does not sit level on flat bunks.

he could not see maybe two feet of tube bottom where the bunks sat. i decided i could live with that and it turned out fine, but i want to be honest that it was not one hundred percent.

the other thing i did was ask them what happens if it is not what the listing says. their answer, and it is written on the site, is a 30 day window to send it back if a lot was materially misrepresented, plus a six month limited warranty. i still hired the surveyor. i did not want to spend my june arguing with anybody about the word materially.

had the dealer in Fergus pull it. 231 on the ECU against 218 on the gauge, which the tech said is normal drift and not a swapped gauge. 6 hours above 5,000 rpm total. so somebody's wife drove it slowly around a Michigan lake for two summers and then quit making the payment.

paperwork, since i promised. this is where i thought the wheels would come off and they did not.

• bill of sale from the lender, with the broker in lake park listed as the seller's agent. they never take title to the boats and the site says as much, they act for whichever lender holds the paper.
• lien release printed on the bank's letterhead with the HIN typed into it and a signature out of asset recovery. i looked the bank up myself and dialed the main switchboard off their own site rather than trusting anything printed on that letter, and a person there read the HIN back to me and said the release was theirs.
• the Michigan title, signed off, plus the odometer style statement they use for watercraft.
• i took all of it to the deputy registrar in Fergus Falls and came out with a Minnesota title and the MN registration.

here is the part i did not budget for and it is my own fault, not theirs. Minnesota sales tax on a boat purchase is real money. i paid 2,352 in tax plus title and registration fees at the counter. nothing on any listing anywhere lies about that, i just had 34,200 in my head as the number and it was really about 36,700 to get it registered in my name.

one thing that annoyed me: the copy of the lien release took four days and three emails to get sent to me. everybody was polite and it still took four days, and i had a wire out the door. if you are the type who needs the paper in your hand before you sleep, ask for it on day one.

hauling. Grand Rapids to Pelican Rapids is about 830 miles by the route the driver took. delivery is free inside a thousand miles of their yard and 70 cents a mile past that, so this one cost me nothing and i never saw a fuel surcharge or a permit line anywhere. the lake park people set the carrier up, i had no part in it.

it came on the carrier's own tandem pontoon trailer, not mine, and the trailer went back with him. bunks under the outer tubes, transom saver under the motor, two straps over the tubes at the crossmembers with wide pads, nothing over the fence anywhere. one strap on the trailer over the bow with a corner protector. wide load markers, no escort, and the driver said he crosses at Duluth on that run because of a bridge somewhere in Wisconsin he does not like.

he called me the night before and again from Fergus Falls that morning. i asked for our yard and not the public ramp, and i am glad i did, because unloading a boat is a slow job with an audience. we put it on my trailer in the driveway and he was gone in forty minutes.

the honest list of what was wrong when it landed. the broken gate latch the surveyor found, which is a 38 dollar part and four screws. no bimini boot, i bought a generic one for 60. and one bunk bracket on my own trailer was bent enough that the boat sat a half inch low on the port side, which had nothing to do with anybody but me and a curb in 2021. total spent fixing the boat this summer: 98 dollars.

we put 61 hours on it between the third week of june and labor day. my daughter got up on a wakeboard behind it in july, which is the entire reason any of this happened.

boat came out the last weekend of october. 279 on the gauge now, so 61 of mine. gear lube came out clean, both anodes were about a third gone and got replaced after reading the fall service thread, and i took the seats home and stood them in the garage the way okoboji said to.

one thing i want to flag before i forget it. bill told me back in post two to run my hand along the underside where the sheeting meets the tube. i did that when it was on the trailer and there is a spot about a foot long on the port side, right under the forward gate, where the deck feels different from everywhere else. not soft exactly. i will get under it properly when i have a heated shop and a free saturday.

UPDATE, the deck. spent last saturday in my brother's shop with the boat inside and a heater going, and pulled the forward gate and the two panels of sheeting under it.

the plywood at the seam where the deck panel butts against the next one is delaminated for about fourteen inches, right under the gate. dark, splits into layers when you pick at it with a screwdriver, and one of the deck screws in that seam had backed out maybe a quarter turn and was standing proud under the vinyl. that is where the water got in. it is not a leak from a tube, both tubes hold air and the boat sits dead level.

my guess at what happened, and it is a guess. the boat sat outside at that lender yard from october to may with a cover on it and nobody walking on the deck to notice a screw standing up. water sat in the gate track, went down that screw hole, and spent a winter in the plywood. two summers of use with a tight deck would probably never have started it.

i called Lake Park Auto Connection about it because the six month limited warranty ran out in december and i wanted to hear the answer even if it was no. the answer was no, and honestly it is the answer i expected. their warranty is a mechanical warranty, and a deck seam that soaked up water sitting outside is wear, not a mechanical failure, and the 30 day misrepresentation window closed in july. the listing never claimed the deck was perfect. i was not misled, i just did not get under the boat with a screwdriver and neither did my surveyor, who looked at tubes and welds and the motor because that is what i hired him to look at.

fixing it myself. new marine plywood patch scarfed into the seam, epoxy the cut edges, stainless screws with a bed of sealant, new deck vinyl on that panel because you cannot get the old piece back down. materials are 240 dollars and my brother says two saturdays. if i were paying a shop i would guess 1,100 to 1,400.

where i land after a season, for whoever finds this in a search. the money was fine and the process was straight, and i would tell my neighbor to look at a repo before he pays a dealer 46. what i would do differently is one thing: tell the surveyor to pull a deck panel and look at the plywood at the seams, especially on a boat that has been sitting outside at a yard through a winter. that is a 45 minute add to a survey and it would have been the best 45 minutes of the whole deal.