Three field-tested volumes distilled from decades of waterman's rules — so you never sign on a rotten boat again.
Every tool you need: from the ten-minute dockside test to a hull that outlasts you.
Ten-minute hand tests before you spend a dime.
Buy right, keep her sound, never be fooled again.
Stop the bleed. Handle any sea. Build lasting.
Every test in this system is free, tool-free, and works standing on the dock. You stop guessing the moment you open page one.
All 17 chapters of the complete system
Dale Trawler Yachts
I spent twenty-two years buying, restoring, and selling working trawlers along the Gulf Coast and the Chesapeake before I wrote a single word of this down. My first bad purchase was a 34-foot diesel I bought on a seller's word and a one-page survey — the stringers were soft enough to press a thumb into. I've walked decks from Sarasota to Maine, talked with old-timers who never needed a surveyor because they'd grown up reading hulls the way farmers read soil. I wrote First Fixes because I watched men just like me — careful, experienced, not naive — hand over checks on boats that should have been rejected in the first ten minutes. The tests in this system cost nothing and require nothing but two hands and the willingness to trust what they tell you. That is exactly what I wish someone had handed me thirty years ago.
I have stood beside more than a few good men on docks — smart men, careful men, men who had been around boats their whole lives — and watched them buy something that was going to cost them dearly. Not because they were foolish. Because nobody had ever given them a clear, physical system for what to check before the handshake. The old watermen I learned from didn't carry meters or checklists. They used their hands, their noses, and forty years of pattern recognition. I've spent the better part of two decades turning that pattern recognition into something you can learn in an afternoon and use the same day. This collection isn't written for beginners, and it isn't written to impress you. It's written for the man who has already been burned and is standing in front of another boat wondering if he's about to make the same mistake again. You're not. Not after this.
Take the system dockside. Run the tests on a real boat. If you don't find it sharper and more useful than anything you've paid a surveyor for, email us within 7 days and you'll get every cent back. No forms. No runaround.
One clear system. No tools. No guesswork. No more hollow feeling in your gut.
GET THE FULL SYSTEM $97 →Get First Fixes alone and run the hand tests on your next boat this week. Upgrade to the full system anytime.
Get the complete first chapter as PDF, right now. No spam.
