Acceptance Of Vessel

The Acceptance Of Vessel, or AOV, date is an important one in the boat buying contract thing.  This is the point by which the conditions listed in the original contract should be met and the buyer informs the seller that they will accept the vessel and complete the contract as-is, will conditionally accept the vessel based on findings from the personal inspection/survey/sea trial (basically a renegotiation option), or reject the vessel and cancel the contract (without loss of the deposit).  It is where we are now with the current boat we have under contract.

On the first boat we had under contract, we rejected the vessel.  We knew that boat would have been a bit of a project boat going in, but the large number of expensive items found (including structural issues) made it more of a project than I, as a first time buyer, was willing to tackle.

The second boat we had under contract, we submitted a conditional acceptance of vessel on at this stage.  During the survey, over $32K worth of issues were found that we did not anticipate (the total list of stuff to fix was between $60K and $70K) .  We asked for a credit at time of closing to cover 50% of the unanticipated items (many of them were broken systems that should have been disclosed ahead of time when we asked if there were any known issues with the boat). The seller wasn't willing to meet us half-way and the previously agreed upon price was higher than we were willing to pay for a boat that needed all that work, so the conditional acceptance of vessel became a rejection of vessel at that time.

With the current boat there were about $12K worth of items we did not anticipate (and a total of $42K). There are only a couple issues that I would consider critical (water leaking into the boat is considered critical...right?) and would like to have them fixed, so we are again submitting a conditional acceptance of vessel asking that the items be fixed.  It isn't a big or expensive list (maybe 15% of the unanticipated stuff) but I want the boat ready to be moved when we close so it is critical to us. We are submitting the Conditional AOV today.

Hopefully this seller will see that this is more than fair and we will finally have our boat.