There is a very diverse range of pre-owned, second-hand, used speed boats, power boats and motor boats available on eBay. They come in a bewildering array of hull shapes and sizes and engine types and sizes. So if you are thinking about buying one, it’s important to decide what you are looking for first. Here are a few things to consider based on my experience …

Size

How big do you want the boat to be? Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Smaller boats can be towed behind smaller cars. When we bought our second, bigger boat, we also had to buy a bigger car to tow it!

Where are you going to store the boat when not in use? Our first boat would fit in our garage but our second boat is one inch wider than our garage door and so has to stay on our drive which is a nuisance.

Smaller boats are also easier to get in and out of the water. We used to launch our first boat from a beach. To do this we had to push the trailer into the water until it was deep enough for the boat to float off. This was quite easy to do at high tide when the water got deep pretty quickly. But at low tide we would have to push the boat out quite a long way until the water got deep enough for the boat to float off. It was quite a heavy boat and the trailer was heavy, too. So this was a difficult job on soft sand.

Launching our Picton 170 GTS from the beach was hard work!

To retrieve the boat from the sea we had to push the trailer out to the boat, float the boat on to the trailer, then attach a long rope from the trailer in the sea to our car on the beach and tow the boat out of the water that way. All this would have been a lot easier if we had a smaller, lighter boat.

How many people and/or how much equipment will you have in the boat when in use? If you will be in the boat on your own, or with one passenger, without any equipment, you don’t need a big boat. But if you plan to spend a day in a boat with your family or a bunch of mates, with wakeboards, waterskis, inflatables, spare fuel tanks, food and drink, you’re going to need a bigger boat!

It would have been easier for us to have a smaller boat to launch from the beach but then we wouldn’t have been able to fit all our children and some friends in the boat so it wouldn’t have been as much fun.

The second boat we bought is bigger to fit more people in for more fun but this made beach launching impossible. So we now have a 20 minute drive to launch our boat from a slipway.

Of course, if you keep your boat at a marina, you don’t need to worry about towing it and launching it. But if you can afford marina fees you probably aren’t reading this blog about pre-owned speed boats!

Use

What do you want the boat for? If you just want to potter around a lake, or want to go fishing, you don’t need speed. In fact, if you are going to use the boat on a lake or river there may well be speed restrictions. So you can buy a boat with a small engine which will be cheaper to buy, and cheaper to run, than a bigger engine.

But if you want to pull wakeboarders, waterskiers, kneeboarders or inflatables, and anticipate having several people on the boat, you’ll need an engine that’s big enough to cope.

Price

Obviously price is important. You need to decide how much you can afford to spend. No doubt you will be hoping to bag a bargain but bear in mind that something that is cheap may end up costing you dearly in the long run. If no one else is bidding on a boat, you may get yourself a bargain. But they may not be bidding because the boat, or the engine, is in poor condition. You may end up spending a lot on maintenance and repairs. So your “bargain” may turn out to be very expensive and you could easily end up throwing good money after bad.