Twenty-odd years around boats, eleven as a surveyor.

I grew up hauling traps with an uncle who believed a boat would tell you everything you needed to know if you shut up and listened. I spent a decade rigging and repairing before I ever wrote my first report, which turns out to be the right order to do it in.

My surveys now run across the Northeast coast, from the Down East reaches through Penobscot and Casco bays, down through the islands, across Buzzards Bay and Long Island Sound, and as far as the Jersey shore and the Chesapeake approaches when a client has a good reason. Most jobs are pleasure craft — center consoles, downeast cruisers, coastal sailboats — with a steady rotation of lobster boats, small draggers, launch & tender work, and the occasional harbor pilot vessel.

The work I'm proudest of is the survey that kills a deal. Not because I enjoy killing deals — I don't — but because it means a buyer avoided a bad boat and a seller got an honest accounting of what they actually had. That's the job. The work I'm second proudest of is the survey that saves a deal: the one where a boat people had written off turns out to be exactly as sound as her owner said, and the report proves it.

I write my own reports. Every word. I don't use a report-writing service, I don't use AI to rephrase findings, and I don't have an assistant who fills in the templates. If you're reading my report, you're reading me.