last spring, and would like to share a story so others may avoid my plight. I had two boats in mind to buy, but the one that I got had a nice galvanized trailer, a bigger 90hp engine, and was slightly cheaper. I went to South Carolina to buy it from a nice family. They had bought the trailer from a pawn shop a couple years earlier. When I came back to North Carolina to get tags for the trailer, it turns out it had been stolen. The law enforcement officers were great and helped walk me through the process of what was to come. There was a mix up in serial numbers, so it turns out, mine wasn't the one that was stolen. ...until they contacted me again a few weeks later, and informed me it was, in fact, the stolen trailer. Fortunately, I was able to purchase it from the insurance company that had paid the claim to the original owner a few years prior. They didn't really want to spend the money to have to pick up a trailer and put the effort into selling something they had taken off the books already so they sold it to me (this is the second time I had to buy this trailer). I guess the moral of the story is that you should always be wary of trailers (or boats) without good documentation. The people I bought it from were honest with what they knew. I just got stuck with the bill, because the state I live in checked into it better. My only legal course to get the money was to sue the people that sold me the boat, then they could sue the pawn shop, then the pawn shop could sue the thief. I'm not about suing good people, so I just took the few hundred dollars loss as tuition to the school of boat ownership (there has certainly been higher tuition paid to this school). I hope this helps someone looking to get into boat ownership.
