bertram31.com

Amberjack was in the yard last week for an insurance required survey. It’s been awhile and my last couple surveyors were ‘questionable’ so I asked around and found someone recommended by people in the industry. He was a pleasant guy, been around a while. He looked in every compartment and took lots of images, was done in 3 hours and a lot of that was talking boats with me.

The survey came back all thumbs up except for lack of smoke detector and wing nuts on the battery terminals instead of battery lug nuts but the strange thing was some outright wrong information. None of it was serious stuff, for instance “hard black rubber” instead of heavy aluminum guard and “two side by side fuel tanks instead of single 176 gallon tank”. These misstatements were scattered throughout the survey report. You could see where he weighed in on important stuff such as not performing a water saturation test on the hull because it is solid glass and that all anchor line attachments were tight and seized with stainless steel wire but a lot of the survey seemed to be written by a shadow hand. My wife who is much smarter than I looked at it and said “artificial intelligence”.

Doug,

My son who works at Google Sales in Dublin, says
“we ain’t seen nothing yet”.

A friend of mine is a surveyor. Several years ago he showed me the software for the industry. It comes with lots of check the provided choices, if not a great match, go with the closest choice seemed to be the least painful option. At the end it tidies up the report to be printed. Somehow I don't see him going with close enough for descriptions, but can easily see where others might be ...its close enough.

Then again, could be AI or dictated to AI for report and not proof read.

I had AI create an excel spreadsheet for me...in seconds it created something kinda workable with requests to modify to suit me better. I played with it a bit and it is scary how good AI is. In the end I didn't use as there was something always just a little off, but if I took the time to learn how to work with it...that is something I have to start doing.

The world is a changing...

Doug

I am afraid that the surveyors of today are not like those of 20 years ago. They seem to overlook stuff or are not proofing their reports.

I had one a couple of years ago and I was not impressed. He was of the mind if he didn't see something that should be there, he didn't ask and assumed the boat didn't have it. Like the garboard drain plug.

When I got the report, I had to have him make changes after I proved the missing items existed with pictures I had to send him.