Surveying a Wooden Hull Is a Different Job
Hire someone who owns a pick and knows what fastening sickness looks like. Not everyone with a moisture meter does.
By Boatmere Brokerage Desk · Updated · 6 min read
The first thing to understand is that a wooden hull is supposed to be wet. Point a moisture meter at one and you learn nothing at all, which is a problem if that is the main tool your surveyor brought.
What does a wooden boat survey involve?
Physical investigation, mostly, and a fair amount of it is destructive in small ways.
Sounding. The surveyor works over the hull with a mallet, listening. Sound timber rings. Rot and delamination thud. This is the single most informative thing that happens all day and it takes hours.
Pick testing. A sharp probe pressed into suspect areas. Healthy wood resists and the pick stops. Rotten wood takes it like cork. Expect the surveyor to leave small holes, and expect a good one to ask permission first.
Pulling fastenings. A few sample screws or bolts, drawn and examined. This is how you find out whether the boat is bronze or galvanised fastened and what condition the fastenings are in. It is the highest-value ten minutes of the survey.
Floors and frames. The structural members behind the planking, and the place where boats quietly die. Water sits in the bilge, floors rot, and the hull loses the thing that ties the planks to the keel.
Keel bolts. On a ballasted boat, at least one bolt drawn and inspected where practical. Corroded keel bolts are the failure nobody wants to think about.
What the report should tell you
Three things, specifically.
Where the boat is now: the rot, the soft spots, the fastening condition. What is coming: the jobs that will need doing within five years and what they will cost. And how it has been kept, which the surveyor reads from a hundred small signs — whether the bilge is clean, whether the paint is built up in twelve layers, whether repairs were done properly or bodged.
That third judgement is the reason to hire a specialist. It cannot be measured and it predicts your ownership better than any single finding.
Finding the right surveyor
Ask one question: how many wooden hulls do you survey in a year?
If the number is under ten, keep looking. Timber failure modes are specific, and a surveyor who works mostly on GRP will do a conscientious job and still miss things a timber specialist spots in the first hour.
Regional classic boat yards know who the good ones are, and they will tell you if you ask. So will the local wooden boat association, and there is one almost everywhere there are wooden boats.
What findings should stop you
Rot in the floors or frames is the serious one. Planking is replaceable and relatively straightforward. Structural members behind it are neither.
Widespread fastening sickness means refastening, which is a five-figure job on anything over thirty feet, and it is not optional once it starts.
Everything else, and I mean nearly everything else, is a negotiation rather than an exit. Soft spots in a plank, a tired deck seam, weeping around a through-hull. Those are the normal findings on a sixty-year-old boat and they are why the price is what it is.
Frequently asked questions
- What does a wooden boat survey involve?
- Sounding the hull with a mallet, pick-testing suspect timber, pulling sample fastenings, checking floors and frames for rot, examining seams and deck joints, and assessing the keel bolts. Moisture meters are largely useless because wood is supposed to be wet.
- How much does a wooden boat survey cost?
- More than GRP: typically $30 to $45 per foot against $22 to $30, because it takes longer and requires a specialist. Add the haul-out, and add fastening samples if the surveyor recommends pulling them.
- What is fastening sickness?
- Corroding metal fastenings breaking down the wood around them, leaving dark staining and a soft ring at each fastening. It is the classic failure mode of galvanised-fastened hulls and it means refastening, which is a five-figure job.
- Can any marine surveyor inspect a wooden boat?
- Technically yes, competently no. Ask directly how many timber hulls they survey a year. If the answer is a handful, find someone else — the failure modes are specific and knowing them takes repetition.
