Mark what fails before the surveyor does.

§ 01 · Why we like getting this call

Survey prep is the cheapest insurance you can buy. A surveyor who finds eleven items that you didn't know about will write a long letter to your underwriter and your underwriter will sometimes raise the premium. A surveyor who finds two items you knew about and had a corrective plan for will write a short, complimentary letter. The math on the master-rate hours we spend walking the boat is favorable.

§ 02 · The 11 items we flag first

Documented at length in the October 2025 bulletin. In short:

1. Battery hold-down. ABYC E-10 §10.6 — battery boxes, retention, ventilation. Almost always a finding.
2. Polarization at the shore-power inlet. ABYC E-11 §11.18. Hot and neutral consistently terminated. Reverse polarity is a 30-second fix and a routinely-missed finding.
3. Bonding system continuity. We megger the bonding bus to the engine block, the rudder shaft, and the prop shaft.
4. Galvanic isolator presence and condition. ABYC A-28. Boats that should have one and don't, or have one that has failed shorted.
5. Overcurrent protection within 7 inches of the battery positive terminal. ABYC E-11 §11.5. Almost universally violated on older boats.
6. Wire gauge correctness. We pull a sample at three locations and verify against the load.
7. Strain relief at the shore-power inlet. The cordage cannot pull the inlet out of the boat. Sounds obvious; isn't.
8. Engine-room lighting. Two independent circuits, one on the genset emergency bus, both on switches accessible from the deck.
9. Bilge-pump float-switch wiring. The high-water alarm must be on its own circuit, not piggy-backed on the pump.
10. Fuel-system grounding. Tank-to-bonding bus continuity. Often broken at the fill plate.
11. Documentation. The boat needs an as-built electrical drawing. If she doesn't have one, we make one.

§ 02 · The walk itself

A walk takes four to six hours on a 50-foot boat, longer on larger steel hulls. Dom does the walk, with one journeyman taking notes. We work from a printed checklist that we have evolved over fifteen years; the current version is keyed to ABYC E-11 with cross-references to NEC 555 and 46 CFR.

We do not energize anything live. We measure with insulation testers and clamp meters, in the order: visual inspection of every panel, megger every cable run, voltage-drop tests at distant loads, and finally a thermal scan of the main switchboard while it's running.

§ 04 · The corrective package

Output is a single-page corrective-action sheet, one row per finding, with the ABYC or NEC section, the photograph, the recommended fix, the labor hours, and the parts cost. The sheet goes to the captain. The same sheet, with our hours and parts, goes onto the estimate.

We then do the corrective work (or you do it; many captains prefer to do the easy items themselves), and we re-walk before the surveyor's date. The re-walk is at our cost — the rate sheet's master-rate hour for the re-walk is built into the original quote.

§ 05 · Cost

A walk is $720–$1,260 depending on boat size; the corrective work is quoted as part of the package. Most boats land between $2k and $8k of corrective work; the dramatic ones run higher and we tell you on the spot. The full breakdown is on rates.

Cross-references: every other plate on this site, in some form. The walk feeds them all. The October 2025 bulletin has the long-form story.