Articles

Field Notes & Technical Commentary

Forty-five years of marine commissioning and forensic survey discipline, applied to high-performance engineering and the evaluation of AI-integrated workflows.

The Right Way to Buy — or Sell — a Boat: Captain Carl McBride with marine diagnostic instruments and a boat hauled out on a travel-lift.
Buying & Selling • 2026

Buying and Selling Your Boat, Done Right

Removing the stress of the unknown, protecting your investment, and getting more from every day on the water.

Define the requirement before the hunt, know which survey you need and in what order, and inspect before you survey — the highest-return move in boat buying. A buyer's-agent field guide to the whole lifecycle.

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Aerial view of dozens of powerboats anchored together over a shallow turquoise sandbar.
Market Analysis • 2026

The Used Powerboat Market Has Changed the Rules

Most buyers and sellers haven't noticed yet. Misreading the change is costing sellers real money and costing buyers good boats.

New powerboat sales fell 8.8% in 2025 — but the real story is in the used market, and it's a utilization filter, not a demand collapse. What the data says, the four drivers behind the cooling, and how condition now sets price.

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No sea trial, no service — AI commissioning checklist beside a performance dashboard.
The Trials Deck • No. 1 • 2026

The Sea Trial Problem

Nobody accepts a vessel off the builder's spec sheet. So why are we deploying AI off the vendor's benchmark?

A marine commissioning framework for accepting AI into production: write the acceptance criteria before the demo, trial on your worst water, put one name on the signature line, instrument for quiet failure, and set the resurvey date.

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The Transfer Standard — an operator at the helm of an unmanned surface vessel under trials at sunset.
The Trials Deck • No. 2 • 2026

The Transfer Standard

Why an autonomous vessel still needs a human at the helm — once.

On a clean-sheet hull the sensors ship with precision but no meaning. The experienced operator is the transfer standard that carries calibration to the vessel — before the autonomy stack can mean anything at all.

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The Interface — operator at the helm with the electronic sensing suite and a signed calibration agreement.
The Trials Deck • No. 3 • 2026

The Interface

The baseline isn't established by the human or the instruments. It's established between them.

What commissioning actually commissions: an integrated sensing system with a trained human as one of its instruments — and the documented record of that partnership reaching agreement about reality.

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