Log IX - Artemis 1 (Choosing - Part 1)

After importing a boat myself, I realised that not many people had done it before. Most of the boaters will usually get an agent to do everything for them. In case you are one of those who like to do things yourself like what I did, you might find some of the information useful in the following blog posts.

Anyway the posts will be based purely on my single boat purchasing experience, I believe that there are better ways to do certain tasks, and if there is, please drop me a message so that I will know what to do for my next purchase. I shall start from the very beginning - picking a boat.

There are 2 main countries that I looked at when I was choosing my boat - Australia and USA. Of course there are many other places you can choose to look for your dream boat, but I narrowed down to these 2 countries because of the credibility. Unless you have too much cash and want to fly there and stay for a couple of weeks to settle the transaction, most of the communication will be done through emails or phone calls. So the credibility of the local broker you are dealing with is very important.

You will not want to transfer tens of thousands overseas to a country that is known for scams do you?


Australia has the geographical advantage over USA as it is much nearer to Singapore, hence the shipping will be cheaper. The power rating is also similar at 240V. But for USA, the voltage rating is 110V.

This is a typical US 110V wall socket.

Buying a boat from Australia looks like a more logical choice. However, there are many cases of boat owners in USA unable to finance their boat loans due to the economic downturn in the past decade. And I guess this is the reason why the average selling price of boat in the US is much lower as compared to Australia.

At the end of the day if you factored in the higher shipping costs from USA and the costs of installing a transformer to step down the shore power from 240V to 110V, you might find certain bargains in Australia better than US. But without knowing much on the shipping and transformer costs at that point of time when I was choosing the boat, it seemed obvious to me then that I should go for the cheaper boats in the states.

Next is the question of what type of boat you want. I shall not list the types of boat here as you can easily google the types of boat or yacht to get your answers. For me, I know what I want because I have been thinking of buying it since 6-7 years ago and it is only now then I put my first step forward. I was looking for a cabin cruiser with a small living area and designed for fishing.

These criteria narrowed down my search by a lot. FYI, the number of resale boats in USA is more than the number of boats registered in Singapore. So narrowing down your search criteria will save you a lot time. And finally I shortlisted to just 2 models of boat - Grady White Marlin 300 and Wellcraft Coastal 330.

Grady White Marlin 300

Wellcraft Coastal 330

Grady White is well known for making quality luxury fishing boat, so basically you cannot go wrong with this brand. As for Wellcraft, frankly speaking I was not aware of this brand until I started researching on fishing boats. It was shortlisted because I was attracted by the cabin design.

What is the cabin feature that attracted me? And which model did I choose eventually? They shall be revealed in my next post.