Maddgog- excellent procedure info. for buying a boat in the U.S.. your bang on. ! good info.. sounds very straight forward as it should be... in my experience it was a little bit more complicated...
-Make sure the factory trailer inspection decals on the trailer are readable and not worn away or missing. Canadian tire will lot pass the inspection ! They will make you contact the manufacture of the trailer and you have to pay to get new decals sent to you! Huge pain in the butt! I had to deal with Shorlander, big run around ect.. took some time to get the decals sent to me. In that time you can't buy insurance until Canadian tire passed it.. had to keep buying temp. insurance. waste of money each time and time consuming running around..
-When we had to finally buy the insurance, its not like your just renewing your car insurance, its creating a new policy from scratch, allot more paper work and time consuming for the insurer agent. We had to go to three insurance places before they agreed to do it...and you had to have all your legal paper work! we had a binder full of it!....
-At the boarder we found customs very vigilant. Took us 2 hrs to get through the boarder. They took our wallets and totally emptied them on the hood of my truck and sent us to go sit in the waiting room of the customs office! I watched the guy from the window and he inspected studied every piece of paper, credit card, note ect. for 30 min!!! then he studied all our sales paper and documents from the sale of the boat.. furthermore he went through my truck, opened my suitcase searched the truck. Ironically, they never searched the boat?! latter they took each of us aside one by one and interrogated us for 10-15 min. each to see if our stories matched.. ! I had to make a phone call to my home on my cell phone from the customs waiting room.. Ond of the customs head guys saw me smiling/laughing a little bit while I was on my cell phone.. he comes running out of his office and stare me down at my face and points his finger into my face and demands me to "END YOUR CALL NOW!!" ..."END YOUR CALL NOW!!" I had close my cell phone with out finishing my sentence... .. customs can be the biggest f'n butt holes!! Was not a nice experience....