Best advice. If your seriously interested in it get a professional surveyor that is familiar with Gradys and also take it to a mechanic to look at the motors. This will probably be on your dime though. But will worth it , in the long haul
First of all, I'm assuming OP is new to this, I got that sense. If not, ignore everything I'm saying because you know already
I can't agree with Bloodweiser more. I so wish I had spent more time on the forums learning before I bought my first boat. There is a saying "buy your second boat first" for people like me who jumped into boating too quickly. That was a $15,000 mistake, or a lot more because I got gun shy and went all in on brand new for my 2nd boat.
If I had gone the surveyor route, I'd probably be running 5-10 year old 228 that cost me less half of what I paid. I got so burned by the first boat, I wanted to have no problems and solid dealer support.
If you want to spend time on the forums, what I've learned is:
For gradys and for a generally welcome forum, this site rocks. Yeah, you will get the salty reply from time to time, in my case I deserved it, I haven't seen much of the flexing that is pretty normal. So go greatgrady, nice folks.
General forums are bloody decks aka
www.bdoutdoors.com and THT aka
www.thehulltruth.com. The first one is run by Ali, nice guy and he has the Local Knowlege TV show on Amazon (I believe). He claims that bloody decks is the biggest fishing website but in my experience THT forums are more active. I visit both but I can go weeks or months skipping bloody decks but THT gets my attention almost daily.
And then you want to track down your local area forum if there is one. I'm Bay Area California, for me that is coastsidefishingclub.com.
I did a thread on THT about boats for fishing the Pacific. I'm a relative newbie so listen to people with more experience, but I think many of them would agree it is important to know the waters you are going to fish (or whatever it is you want to do). Different boats do different things. I started on a center console and thought that was bees knees (they are nice when you are solo and have to chase a fish around the boat but they are cold). First ride in the 228 and I was sold on the big helm, it's toasty in there. I'm less sold on the cuddy cabin as your main dry storage, it's fine for rarely used stuff, it's awful for storing stuff you need to get at all the time. I am sold on the decked in bow, you can stuff that bow and have it be a non event. Not that you want to but it's nice to not really have to worry about that.
Good luck!
