2020 Whaler 280 Outrage off rubiautosales.com, my first season

310 hours on a pair of 4.6 V8 Verado 300s is barely broken in. i have those motors on the lift all week and the ones that give people trouble are the ones that sat two seasons on a lift with ethanol in the tank, not the ones that ran 100 hours a year. even compression and a leakdown under 10 on all sixteen means the rings and the valves are happy, and the VesselView history would have shown any overheat or low oil pressure event, so if your tech pulled it and it was clean you know more about those motors than most owners know about their own.

couple things. the 300 hour service is coming up on you and on the V8 that is plugs, both gear lubes, fuel filters and the water pump impellers if nobody has done them. do the impellers regardless, they are cheap and a 300 hour impeller in gulf water is on borrowed time. pull the thermostats and the poppet valves while you are in there, they scale up in salt. and that tired anode on the starboard motor, do all of them on both motors at once, they are 60 bucks a set and the boat is worth 185.

a weeping tab actuator and a livewell pump on a 310 hour boat is maintenance, not a red flag. you did this the right way paying for the compression test before the money moved.

run a 280 out of charleston with a group of women who fish the nearshore reefs and the ledge, so let me add the boat side since alonzo covered the motors. the 280 is the one Whaler that really does both jobs. it is shallow enough to work the jetties on a falling tide and stiff enough that a 3 foot chop on the way back from the ledge does not beat you up. the price you paid is real. the brokers in charleston wanted 215 last spring for one with 500 hours and a scuffed hull side.

the port tab weeping is common on that year. the Bennett actuators seep at the ram seal when they sit and it is a 20 minute swap with the boat on the trailer. do it before your first cold front because you will want those tabs working when it gets snotty coming back through the pass.

found this thread searching rubi auto sales reviews so figured id ask the people who actually did it. i live in atlanta and drive down to st simons and the panhandle a few times a year and i want my first real boat. budget is 45 to 60 and i am looking at 22 to 24 foot bay boats, Pathfinders and Sea Hunts mostly. i have owned a jon boat and that is it.

is it dumb to buy a first saltwater boat sight unseen from an online auction instead of a dealer with a service department? i have never spent this kind of money on something i could not walk around, and every story i read about rotten transoms and blown powerheads has me nervous. what should someone like me actually be looking at?

surveyor here, not the one who did your boat but i do this for a living out of jacksonville and i survey a lot of 25 to 32 foot center consoles for buyers who found them online. the list you got back is a good list. none of it is structural, none of it is the transom, and all of it together is under two grand including the bottom job. i have handed people reports on boats with half the hours that had a transom reading 30 on the meter and a stringer that went soft where the fuel tank sits. those are the boats that ruin people.

for kyle and anyone else reading, what wade described is exactly how it should go. the surveyor gets the boat on the hard and in the water, meters the transom and the deck, percussion tests the hull, checks every through hull and the fuel system, then rides along on the sea trial watching the gauges. you get a written report with the findings before money moves. a seller that lets that happen without pushback is telling you something about the boat. i have had brokers refuse it. Rubi Auto Sales apparently did not.

one thing for wade. on the dead livewell pump, check the pump housing before you assume it is the seacock or the wiring. on those Whalers it is a cartridge style pump and if the housing is fine the motor cartridge alone is 40 bucks.

venice louisiana here. we run out of the pass to the rigs and everything we own lives in salt, so the thing i always look at on a used center console is where it spent its life. a boat that lived on a lift or a trailer and got flushed after every trip is a different animal from one that sat in a wet slip all summer. ask rubi for the previous owner's marina and look it up, you learn a lot from that.

on your Verados, pull the cowlings and look at the powerhead bolts and the lower cowl seal. white powder around the bolt heads means it did not get flushed. and get under that aluminum trailer with a flashlight. galvanic corrosion where the steel u bolts meet the aluminum will eat the frame from the inside and you cannot see it from the top. on a 2020 with 310 hours it is probably fine, i am just saying look.

we bought our 2019 Pathfinder 2500 Hybrid off the same site last summer and the part nobody talks about in these threads is the paperwork and the transport. i keep the books for our shop so that is my department. a boat is two titles, not one. the hull and the trailer, and the motor rides on the bill of sale by serial number. our hull title and the trailer title came in about a week, the bill of sale listed the hull ID and the motor serial like it should, and the alabama registration went through in one trip to the probate office, which anyone in mobile county knows is rare. wade, since yours is USCG documented, the abstract of title is what your insurance will want. ask rubi auto for the documentation number and pull the abstract yourself for 25 bucks.

we did not fly out. we used a boat hauler the rubi lot put us in touch with, a guy who runs a one ton and pulls boats on their own trailers up and down the gulf coast, and it showed up in five days with the hours and the fuel level logged. the only hiccup was a trailer light that quit on the way and he fixed it in our driveway before he left. small thing, but that is how you can tell how a place does business.

different boat, same lot. our 2021 Robalo R247 came off the rubi auction last fall and the buying went about like yours. single Yamaha F300, 145 hours, one owner, and they told us up front the battery switch was corroded and one of the bimini fittings was cracked. we sent our own surveyor too and the only thing he found they had not already mentioned was a trailer bearing running warm on the tow to the ramp.

we have put 110 hours on it since, fishing the laguna madre and running out to the short rigs when it lays down. it is a great boat and the price was 13 under what the corpus dealer wanted for one with more hours. i wrote our whole first year up with the real numbers in its own thread here if anyone wants the Robalo side of it. wade, welcome to the club.

pinning this one. it is the most complete online boat buying writeup we have had at the dock in years, and between wade, marisol and ruth we now have three different hulls off the same seller with the survey and the paperwork side written down. that is worth more to the next guy than a hundred dealer reviews. wade, post the season update when snapper opens, folks will want the hours and the fuel numbers.