My Hanover Experience
My Hanover Experience
Blog Article
My Hanover 387: Looks great from far. But is far from Great.
The Purchase
I was shopping for boats in March 2023 when I stumbled on Hanover through an online listing from one of their brokers. We had a few conversations, traded a few texts, and I ended up buying the boat sight-unseen (to be fair, it hadn't been built yet, so it's not like there was a boat to see.) They had similar demo models at a Florida boat show, but I wanted this model (for the closed cockpit.)
I was told I could have pretty much any finishes I wanted. I could pick any color, pick any upholstery fabric, any flooring, etc. I didn't have to be limited to the options in their brochure. As I understand it, my boat was one of the first ones off their production line (in Brazil), and they seemed eager to make the sale. I ended up ordering the 387 with the premium package and several add-ons. I was told delivery would be in May. June at the latest. I was under the impression that the boat was built and all they had to do was customize the finishes and ship it to me. I would learn later that was not the case. It seems that the boat was nothing more than a hull shell at this point, and there was no way a May/June delivery was possible (especially given that it takes more than a month to ship a boat from Brazil to Washington DC.) More on that later.
The BuildAs you might imagine my new toy, and spend the following week working with the broker to come up with all my finish selections. I was told I need to finalize selections by the end of the week or risk delaying delivery. So I got everything together, provided exact details and links to source materials, etc. It was all documented, signed off on, and I made my second (of three) payments on the boat at this point.
Days and weeks tick by without many updates. We're in late April now, and I know it's about a 6-week shipping process (if I'm lucky), so I figure the boat needs to be almost done if we're to stay on schedule. At one point I was told it was 10 days behind schedule, but again, I'll come to learn later that they were always WAAAAAY further behind than the let on.
At one point, they got back to me and told me to use the material sections that I provided would delay delivery and that I should just pick from the standard options in the brochure. That was super frustrating since I spent a ton of time sourcing that stuff (going so far as to do photo-realistic mockups of all the materials on the boat, etc.) My color scheme was basically "burnt orange, charcoal, and cream." But the closest options in their brochure looked like "orange, black, and white." As I told them, I just don't want it to look like Halloween. Burnt orange on charcoal looks great. Orange on black looks like Halloween. They promised that the pictures weren't great representations of the colors and that I'd be happy with their substitutes. (Fast forward to delivery: it's definitely black and orange. In fact, since my boat was one of the first delivered, they used it as their poster child, so you can see my actual boat on their site: https://hanoveryachts.com/hanover-387/. The bright orange gets attention, and I've learned to live with it. But the colors I had selected would have been so much better.)
Anyway, the months tick by. I don' think they made good on a single deadline. I pressed my broker who pressed Hanover, and I would get occasional updates with some low-res videos or pictures. (At least I knew it wasn't a scam. I had to wonder at one point.)
They finally let me know it was ready to ship in July 2023. And they asked for final payment before the boat left the ship yard in Brazil. But our contract calls for final payment upon delivery. So I refused. Especially after all the delays and broken promises, I needed to see this boat before I made final payment.
The Delivery
Since they had already made shipping arrangements, they put my boat on the shipping boat to at least get it headed to the States. Then I got word from the broker: "Dan (Hanover CEO) won't send this boat to Baltimore if you don't send final payment. He'll have it off loaded in Ft. Lauderdale and sell it to someone else." The contract terms are clear, so I held firm and told them that if they didn't the deliver the boat, they'd be in breach of contract, and we'd have to let the courts sort that out. But I was not making payment until I saw the boat.
The brokers proposed a compromise: What if I drive from DC up to Baltimore to sea trial the boat, make payment, and then they would drive it down around the Chesapeake bay and delivery it to my marina in DC. That seamed reasonable (well to be fair, "reasonable" to me would have been for them to honor the contract and just deliver the boat to my marina for inspection and sea trial before final payment. But Baltimore is only a 40 minute drive for me, and it was easier to do that than turn this into a legal proceeding.)
So that's what we did. The brokers came down, and Hanover sent a rep up, and we all met at the boat in Baltimore on August 20, 2023. We did a quick sea trial, and aside from a couple of issues they noted would be taken care of post-deliveryot minor issues. For example, they put the wrong flooring down, so that all needs to be replaced (something we're still disputing, even though it's written into the acceptance document.)
One last wrinkle. They asked me to sign an acceptance document that said that I accepted the boat "as is" without warranty and such. It's the kind of thing you'd sign for a used boat sale where it truly was an 'as is' sale. But that's not what this was. This was a brand new boat, with warranty, and there were already known issues that needed to be remedied. So this was not an 'as is' sale, and I refused to sign a documentsaying it was. The brokers are trying desperately to broker a deal between Dan and I and holding firm. At one point, I was told that if I didn't sign the form and make payment by 5pm, they were sending the boat back to Florida. I told them to go for it.
The next morning after everyone cooled down, I agreed to sign an addendum to our original sales contract (as opposed to an 'as is' acceptance document, that basically said that I was accepting delivery subject to a few outstanding items that needed to be addressed. I made the final payment, and the brokers drove my boat from Baltimore to DC, and I finally had my boat.
It was a brutally painful process, but finally had my boat.
Before I move on, two very important pieces of advice to anyone buying a Hanover:
1. Ask for the warranty upfront. Their website makes it sounds great, but it's VERY restrictive and limited in my opinion.
2. Don't sign an 'as is' acceptance. New vehicles are not 'as is' sales!
The Ownership
Once I finally had my boat to myself, I of course spent some time just going over it all and getting to know it. From the very first day, there were issues. I started to notice some things missing. As I mentioned, the flooring was the wrong stuff. It was the wrong material and wrong pattern. The TV was missing. The engine room fire extinguisher system was missing. The electric engine hatch was missing. The tile backsplash in the kitchen was missing. I thought the microwave was missing, but when I went back and looked at the brochure again, it said "space for microwave." So I'll own not reading the fine print closely enough on that one (even though the space is for it is left unfinished in a way that you basically have to put something there if you don't want to see the unfinished inside of the hull. Why they wouldn't just include the microwave is beyond me.)
Now that I had more time with it, I started to get a closer look at some of the workmanship. It's bad. For a luxury item that costs as much as a house, the things I was finding were just unacceptable. Carpentry was misaligned. Trim looked to be hot-glued on almost as an afterthought. Parts of the boat looked like the were used as work benches. There were missing screws and nuts. Dangling wires that went to nothing. The list goes on.
One one of my first runs out with some friends, I ran out of gas. (They had already disclosed that they installed the wrong fuel sender so that the gas gauge was not reading accurately. But I thought they had fueled the boat up before delivery, as they said they would do. But apparently not. They delivered it almost empty, so I ran out of gas under way.)
Then the issues started happening. I'm not going to list them all out here, as I have a whole page dedicated to that here. But it seems that every time I go down to my boat, there's a new issue. It's infuriating.
When my friends ask me how I like my boat, I tell them that while I love the concept and the big picture stuff, this particular boat was just taken out of the oven a bit too early. It was one of the first boats off their production line, and my guess is that this was the boat the ship yard learned all their lessons on (or at least, I hope they learned sommissing screwstsmanship, etc. But some of the issues are real design flaws in my opinion. They can't really be fixed without major effort and expense. And as any of the mechanics who have since worked on my boat will tell you, this boat is very difficult to work on. There is very limited access, nothing is exposed, and everything is had to get to. For example, you need to completely remove the generator just to access the house batteries. And should I ever have to pull out an engine, my mechanic said it would be easier to just cut the hull and deal with that repair than it would to get the engines out of the tiny hatch used to access them.
Which is all to say that I believe this boat is a lemon. I have suggested as much to Hanover and have asked them to buy it back. Or repair it all and give me more warranty. Or swap it for a new one where these issues have been addressed. Or to give me a big enough of a cash rebate that I can use to deal with what I'm sure will be a very costly boat to maintain in the coming years. Hanover has refused these requests. Which is why I built this site. Maybe some public pressure will get them to do right by me. And if not, then we're going to have to go to court, I suppose.