Boats For Sale

Jet skis, lanchas, sailboats and the trailer underneath:

what separates them is how far from home each one is meant to go. Jet skis are the smallest and the easiest to keep in a garage. Most are Sea-Doo, Yamaha WaveRunner or Kawasaki, from light play models to three-seaters that tow a tube. Power boats run from an open fibreglass lancha to a fishing hull with a cabin, and inflatable dinghies sit at the bottom end, as tenders or as a boat that fits in the bed of a pickup. Sailboats are a different purchase altogether, bought to cruise or to live aboard and kept on a mooring. A boat trailer also turns up on its own, from someone who sold the boat and kept the trailer.

A towed boat or a moored one, settled by where you live:

if home is in the Central Valley, you are shopping for something you can tow: a jet ski, an inflatable or an open lancha that a pickup can pull over the mountains to the coast and back. Anything bigger ends up on a mooring or in a marina, which means paying for the slip and relying on someone near the boat to check on it after a storm. A towed boat gets rinsed with fresh water after every trip; a moored boat lives in salt all the time and needs fresh antifouling and a bilge pump that works when nobody is aboard. With inflatables, the fabric matters more than the brand. PVC tubes go tacky and the seams start to lift after a few years of tropical sun, while Hypalon tubes last much longer and cost more for exactly that reason.

Jet ski hours and what they do to the price:

used jet skis show the spread most clearly. A two-seater more than ten years old changes hands for around ₡1.5 million, while a Sea-Doo five to eight years old is listed at ₡4 to ₡5.5 million. The older machine is usually bought with work in mind: a pump that wants a new wear ring, a seat split by the sun, parts that are getting harder to track down. The newer one costs more because most of its engine life is still ahead of it.

Ex-rental jet skis and boats that worked for a living:

rental operators on the Guanacaste beaches advertise late-model machines, so their older units keep coming back onto the used market. A rental machine piles up hours far faster than a private one and gets run up onto the sand day after day. Ask directly whether a craft worked for a tour or rental business. That belongs in the price rather than ruling it out. Read the hours on the display, look through the intake grate at the impeller edges for sand wear, run a hand along the bottom for deep gouges from beach landings, and lift the seat to look for salt on the battery terminals and the engine. On a supercharged Sea-Doo, ask whether the supercharger has ever been serviced. On an inflatable, ask the seller to pump it up the night before you visit and see whether it is still firm when you arrive. On a sailboat, the rigging and sails are the expensive surprises: ask how old the standing rigging is and look for rust stains where the wires meet the deck.

A jet ski on its trailer in Heredia, ready to show:

give the year, the hours and whether it ran in salt or fresh water, then photograph the hull bottom, the intake and the hour display. Say plainly if it ever did rental or tour work, and list what goes with it: cover, lifejackets, the trailer. For anything towed, a buyer also needs to know how it gets home: whether the trailer is included and has its own papers, what hitch ball it takes, and whether to bring a pickup. Someone driving up from Liberia or over from Pérez Zeledón wants those answers before setting off, not in your driveway.