What boat do you actually need for Georgian Bay?

Somebody buys in Midland or Tiny Township, gets the keys, and stares at the water like it owes them a weekend. The house problem is solved. The boat problem has just started.

The questions I hear from new owners every summer are the same four. How big does the boat need to be for this water? Which engine? What does it really cost to run? How do you avoid buying someone else's problem? A few years on, the same people ask a fifth: what does the step up to a cabin cruiser actually look like?

So I had a chance to sit down with Caleb Deleon, a client of mine who owns Northern Beaver Marine Services, and talk it through, starting with a first boat under $20,000 and working up. His words are in quotes. The rest is mine.

The bay decides the boat

Caleb did not start with a brand. He started with Georgian Bay.

"For Georgian Bay, you want something deep bottom, and probably in and around the mid to high twenties for length, because Georgian Bay can get a little nasty with wind picking up from certain directions. You're not going to want to be in a situation where you don't feel comfortable behind the wheel."

For day trips he suggests a bow rider. The open layout gives everyone room to move, and if there are kids aboard they will claim the front. A cuddy cabin only earns its space if you think you will overnight now and then. Most of the boaters I talk to in Midland and Tiny want the simpler version: leave after breakfast, anchor at the sand, home before dark.

Under $20,000: layout over badge

I asked how you pick between a Bayliner and a Regal, or any two boats that look alike on a listing. His answer was that there is a buyer for everything, and at this price the badge matters less than the layout.

"Bayliner is one of the most common boats on the water. Sure, they might not make Cobalt-like quality, but what do you really want for something that's not going to break the bank, get you on the water, reliable, and have some fun? Go look at maybe three different boats in that range of length and just feel it out. Go with your family. It's like buying a car. Test drive three of them."

Sit in the washroom. Some are bigger than others, and only you know how much that matters. Stand where the kids will sit.

Mercury or Volvo

With an engine package, you are usually stuck with what the boat came with. Under $20,000 you will not be in the Yamaha outboard market, so the real choice is Volvo or Mercury, and Caleb has a preference.

"I like Mercury. I think Volvo parts are very expensive, and parts are getting harder to get. Mercury, everything seems to be readily available, and most guys who work on boats know how to work on a Mercury engine. You get a couple of the bells and whistles Volvo doesn't give you, like alarms. For somebody who's not really a big boater, it'll say, hey, you're getting a little hot, or your oil level is low."

The prop

Start with an aluminum prop on this water. A stainless prop performs better, but when you find yourself on top of a rock, and on Georgian Bay you will, the aluminum one is the part that gives. Caleb's line: with aluminum you might get lucky and only replace a prop instead of a whole outdrive. With stainless, the rock usually wins the argument further up the drive.

Fuel injection over carburetor

If the budget stretches to it, fuel injected. You turn the key like a car and go. Parts cost a little more than carburetor parts, but the labour runs the other way, because fewer and fewer mechanics know that generation of product. For simplicity, he would recommend fuel injection 100 percent.

The bill the listing never shows you

This is the section most first-time buyers skip, and it is the one Caleb sees the fallout from.

"If you get lucky, you can get away with twenty-five hundred dollars a year on just maintenance. In real-world application, more like five grand. So twenty-five hundred to five thousand just to keep everything well lubricated and the wheel spinning for a season."

That is for a single-engine bow rider around 20 feet. It is before fuel, which is expensive on the water, and before the slip, which he describes as very high. His blunt version: boats are not an investment, and people go into it without realizing how much of a cost it truly is.

The two cheapest jobs people skip, and the two that get expensive when skipped, are oil changes and sterndrive service. On oil, his rule is every 50 hours if you run the boat hard, and at least once a year no matter what. A boat that only puts on ten hours in a summer is not safe from this. The problem is not the hours. It is that the engine got hot and cold only a few times, so condensation builds and there is not enough run time to burn the water out of the oil.

On the outdrive, pull it every year before the boat goes in. Once it is in the water in spring it usually stays there six to eight months, and a leak nobody caught in the fall turns into rust and seized parts by the time anyone looks again.

The reassuring part: if you do that work, the boat will last. In his words, drives and engines are built extremely tough, and there are not a lot of guys going out and blowing up engines. Freshwater boats last so long here that the owners outgrow them before they wear out.

Two inspections, not one

This is also where people get burned.

I asked what he wished first-time buyers knew. He said surveys. There are two different inspections and they are not interchangeable. A mechanic checks the engine, the fluids, does a fuel pressure test, pulls the drive and confirms the outdrive is sound. A surveyor checks the structure: stringers, transom, decks, water intrusion in various places, and often plumbing and some electrical too.

The boat that looked perfect

He told me about a friend's boat from this summer. A 2007, about 30 feet, twin engines, around 400 hours, in great shape by every visible measure. He went down to do a mechanical inspection as a favour. The engines were fine. He started tapping around anyway, because that is what he does in every boat he steps into.

"If you hear a really high-pitched, sharp sound, that's solid. If you tap somewhere and get a deep thud, that means either it's delaminated or there's water inside. It's like tapping a solid wall versus a hollow wall."

He found the soft spot, cut a core sample with a hole saw, and the stringers were rotten through and through. The fiberglass had been laid up so thick nobody would have noticed, and the survey in hand had not caught it. Mechanically perfect, structurally like a car with a rotten frame. It is fixable: engines out, old stringers cut and ground away, new ones epoxied and glassed in. A big job. His friend was sad and happy in the same breath, because if he had bought it not knowing, the bill would have been his.

Above a certain price point, insurers want a survey within the last so many years before they will cover the boat, so if you skip it in the sale you often end up paying for one anyway. Get your own. A seller's survey is a sign of good faith, not a guarantee.

"I've seen a lot of sellers have a survey, but maybe a survey where they chose somebody specifically to hide some things, or not pinpoint certain issues. If you get your own survey with somebody you trust, you might find some things that weren't noted."

Caleb has a local surveyor he trusts, and he will give you the name if you ask him. Whoever you use, research them first. As he put it, people who buy boats and are not happy with how things turned out are not afraid to voice it online.

Then sea trial the boat under load. Idling on the trailer tells you very little. Take a mechanic or somebody who knows boats out with you, because boats are a feeling, and the person who knows what that engine should sound like at speed will hear the problem you cannot.

The cabin cruiser step up

Then a different budget, $60,000 or less, and one boat to buy for life on this water.

"Where we live, you're pretty much looking at Sea Rays. Sea Ray is just the top dog around here. They make a really high quality boat, everything is user friendly, they ride really nice. My personal favourite, if you're getting into that cabin cruiser lifestyle, a Carver all the way. You get the most space, the most bang for your buck."

Meridian is the related line from the same company. His comparison was Buick and GMC: more money, different layouts, a little more polish, but underneath it is still a Carver, which is why they are good boats.

Engines, if you get to choose between two identical boats: Mercury big block for gas, Cummins for diesel, Mercury Verado for outboards. Yamaha is his backup, and a good one, but a little noisier, fewer features, harder to work on, and the parts are expensive.

Where the value sits

The sweet spot for size against price is around 30 feet. Cabin cruisers are a hard sell right now because families are moving to RVs, which are cheaper to own, so there is a lot of boat available for not too bad a price. Fuel injection arrived in the mid 2000s, and his advice is to go 2010 or newer.

Older hulls can be beautifully built. The catch is finding one that has been properly maintained for 30 years across seven to ten owners, and then finding parts for it. He has an early 1990s boat in the shop right now where the engine parts simply cannot be sourced. On paper it is a quarter-million-dollar boat. In the shop it is a very large paperweight.

One day that sells the shoreline

Last question: the day he would run to show the bay to a guest from out of town. One shot, leave the dock at 9:30, back by seven.

"Leave Midland, go up through Honey Harbour, go to Henry's in Sans Souci, have a stop and have lunch there, then go straight across the bay to Beckwith. Hang out at Beckwith for the afternoon, and when the sun starts going down, start getting back to Midland, cross the Main Gap."

Beckwith Island, Beausoleil First Nation land, is known among boaters for its sand. Southern Georgian Bay, Honey Harbour, Parry Sound and the islands between them give you big water, rivers, food and sunsets in one loop. In his words, it is a hard place to leave once you have spent time there.

The last thing he wanted on the record was the community. Strangers on the water who become friends by the end of the day. People who will stop and help you problem solve when you are stuck out there. No listing can show you that. He called it a privilege to be part of it.

Closing the loop

The house gets you to the dock. The boat decides whether the dock becomes a habit.

First boat: deep bottom, mid to high 20 feet, your own survey, and a real maintenance budget.

The step up: Sea Ray or Carver, around 30 feet, 2010 or newer, and a tap on the stringers no matter how well the engines purr.

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