i asked a lot of questions on this board in september and a couple of you told me to write down what happened when it was my turn. so this is the delivery, hour by hour, from somebody who had never bought a boat before and did not know what any of it was supposed to look like.
boat is a 2020 Harris Cruiser 190 with a Mercury 90, 311 hours, and it was at a lender facility in Springfield, Missouri. 18,400 sealed bid through Lake Park Auto Connection. i took delivery on october 22 and it went into storage the same afternoon without touching water, which is a strange way to buy your first boat but that is how the timing worked out.
the sequence, with the days on it:
oct 5, bid in. oct 6 afternoon, email saying i had it.
oct 7, invoice and wire instructions. the invoice was 18,400 flat. no premium, no doc fee, no transport line. i called and asked twice whether there was another invoice coming and there was not.
oct 8, wire went out of my credit union at 10 in the morning. i got a confirmation email the next day.
oct 9, somebody from lake park called me about the delivery address. this is the call where you need to actually think, and i will explain why below.
oct 14, carrier assigned, and i got the driver's cell number.
oct 19 and oct 20, two date changes, one day each. the driver texted both times.
oct 22, 9:40 in the morning, the truck showed up. 14 days after the wire, which matches the about two weeks they say.
the address call. i live in an apartment. my first answer was my parents' driveway in West Fargo, and the scheduler asked me how long the driveway was and whether the truck could get back out without backing onto a street. i had not thought about any of that. we ended up meeting at the parking lot of the church on the corner, on a thursday morning when it was empty, because a truck and a boat trailer is around 65 feet and my mom's driveway is not.
if you take one thing from this post it is that. before that call, go stand where you think the boat is going and imagine a semi in that spot.
what i signed was a delivery receipt that said i had looked at the boat on arrival. so i looked at it before i signed, which took me about twenty minutes with my dad and my phone with the listing photos open, and the driver was fine with it and drank a coffee in his truck.
the church parking lot is the best line in this thread and it is the thing nobody plans for. i have watched a driver spend forty minutes trying to turn around at a resort on Whitefish because the person who ordered the delivery said sure, plenty of room.
what did they hand the boat off onto. did you have a trailer sitting there, did he set it on the ground somehow, or did his trailer stay.
glad you wrote the dates down like that, mine was 12 days and yours was 14 and both of those are inside what the lake park people say on the site, so at least for boats out of the middle of the country that number holds up.
the twenty minutes with the listing photos open is the right way to do it and i want to say why for anybody skimming. the delivery receipt is the moment where a problem is the carrier's or the seller's, and after you sign it, it is yours to argue about. so walk both sides, look down each tube from the bow, open the console, turn the key, check the hour meter against the photo, and count the seats. it is not rude and no driver i have met minded.
october delivery means you get the whole winter to sort out storage and registration with nothing on the calendar. i would rather have your timing than mine, honestly. mine landed in june and i had a boat i had never driven and a family standing in the driveway.
stan_from_brainerd wrotewhat did they hand the boat off onto. did you have a trailer sitting there, did he set it on the ground somehow, or did his trailer stay.
i bought a used tandem trailer off a guy in Moorhead three weeks before, for exactly this. it was sitting in the church lot hooked to my dad's F-150.
and here is my mistake, which is the other reason i wrote this thread. i never set the bunks. i assumed a pontoon trailer is a pontoon trailer. the boat came off his rig and onto mine and it sat with the starboard tube maybe an inch high and the bow further back than it should be, and the driver said out loud, that is not right, and helped me shove it forward with the winch until the bow stop touched. he did not have to do any of that.
i drove it 4 miles to the storage place at 25 mph with the flashers on and my heart going. the shop there put it on a lift, moved my bunks 3 inches, and told me it was lucky it was a four mile trip. that was 140 dollars and it should have been done in september.
the two things that cost me money that i did not plan for, since people always leave this part out. indoor storage from october 22 to the end of april is 41 dollars a foot at the place i used, so 800 dollars for a 19 and a half foot boat. and North Dakota registration and tax at the county, which for an 18,400 purchase price is not a small envelope. nothing about that is a lake park thing, they never said otherwise, it is just money a first time buyer does not have on the spreadsheet.
the boat itself matched the listing. 311 hours on the gauge and 311 in the photo. one cracked cup holder.
this is the third buying report on the board in two months and it is the one i would hand to somebody who has never done it, because it is the only one written by a person who did not already know how any of it worked.
kevin, i took the two questions about North Dakota registration fees out of here and they are their own thread now, since half the members are in Minnesota and the answers were getting tangled.
come back in the spring and tell us how it runs. that is the part none of these three threads has yet.
registration came back last week, so the title is in my name and that part is finished. six weeks from the county, which everybody at work told me was fast.
two things to add for the next person, then i will leave it alone until may.
the scheduling window is a window, not an appointment. i took a vacation day for the first date and then it moved twice, so i burned a day for nothing and then had to ask my dad to meet the truck. if you can, tell them a range of days you are free rather than picking one and building your week around it.
and get the phone number of an actual person early. i had one name at the broker in lake park who answered every time and that made the whole thing feel normal instead of like sending 18 thousand dollars into a website. if you cannot get a human on the phone before you wire money, anywhere, for anything, that is your answer.
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