How to Vet a Refit Yard or Marine Vendor Before You Sign

Every captain has a version of the same story. A clean quote, a friendly yard manager, a confident schedule, and then four months later the boat is still in the shed, the invoice is 60 percent over the number, and the subcontractor who actually did the fiberglass work has never been heard of since. The quote is a marketing document. Vetting the vendor behind it is the real due diligence, and almost nobody does it with the rigor they would apply to buying the boat in the first place.

Start with the paper that protects you when things go wrong. Ask for the yard's certificate of insurance directly from their insurer, not a PDF from the sales office, and confirm the coverage types and limits actually match your exposure: a $30,000 ship repairer's liability limit on a yard hauling your $8 million boat is not coverage, it is decoration. Confirm who insures the boat while it is hauled, you or them, because yards split this both ways and the answer changes your own policy requirements. A yard that gets vague or slow on insurance questions has answered the most important question already.

Then find out who actually holds the wrenches. Most yards are a project office wrapped around a rotating cast of subcontractors, which is fine, the good ones manage trades brilliantly, but you need to know which model you are buying. Ask which trades are in-house employees and which are subbed, ask for the names of the sub firms on your job, and ask whether the yard marks up sub invoices or passes them through. A consulting engineer I work with audited a typical refit file last year: of $900,000 billed, $640,000 was subcontracted work carrying a 22 percent markup nobody had disclosed. Legal, common, and exactly the kind of thing you negotiate before signing rather than discover after.

Change orders are where refit budgets actually die, so investigate the yard's change-order history rather than its quote accuracy. Ask directly: on your last three comparable projects, what was the final invoice as a percentage of the signed estimate? A serious yard knows this number and will discuss it; 15 to 25 percent growth on a discovery-heavy refit is honest reality, while a yard claiming they always land on the estimate is telling you they front-load padding or back-load disputes. Then fix the mechanics in the contract: written change orders with cost and schedule impact, signed by your designated person, before work proceeds. No exceptions, including the convenient verbal ones agreed at the coffee machine.

Reference checks only work if you control the sample. The yard will hand you three delighted clients; thank them and then do your own sampling instead. Walk the sheds and talk to captains whose boats are there now, mid-project, when the honeymoon is over. Find a boat that left the yard a year ago and ask how the work has held up, because paint and fairing problems surface at month eight, not at splash. And ask the one question that gets honest answers from other captains every time: would you bring your next boat back here? The pause before the answer is data.

Schedule promises deserve the same adversarial reading as price. Ask what else is booked in the shed during your window, what the yard's labor headcount actually is, and what happens to your project when an emergency insurance job arrives, because one always does. Get milestone dates into the contract with consequences attached, even modest ones; a yard that will not put any teeth behind its own schedule has told you the schedule is decorative. One charter program I know, call the boat Meridian Blue, lost six weeks of booked charters, roughly $480,000 gross, to a repaint that ran long with no remedy clause in the work order. The yard apologized sincerely and kept all of the money.

Smaller vendors, the electronics installers, the teak crews, the stabilizer service techs, get a lighter version of the same protocol. Insurance certificate, two references you choose from their client list, manufacturer certifications verified with the manufacturer rather than taken from a logo on a business card, and warranty terms in writing with a named human attached. The marine trades run heavily on relationships and reputation, which works in your favor: a vendor's standing among working captains in a port is discoverable in three phone calls, and it is more reliable than anything on their website.

None of this needs to be hostile, and the best yards are not offended by any of it. They answer the insurance question same-day, they volunteer their change-order process unprompted, and they would rather you talk to their mid-project clients than their references. That responsiveness during the courtship is the single best predictor of behavior after the deposit clears. Vendors are on their best behavior before you sign. Whatever you observe then is the ceiling, not the floor.