Anglo European Ltd

Jun 12th, 2016

We ended up using a Balliol Fowden, the man behind this company, from Rugby and I cannot say enough how much I regret this decision, in fact, the whole purchasing experience ended up being a complete nightmare thanks to his incredibly inept survey and the incredibly deceitful chandlery. We paid 780 for the survey, FYI for any out there looking for a survey, that is far too much and if you think you're paying that much because the surveyor claims years of experience, think again. Our money would have been better spent buying our own ultrasonic reader to get the depth of the hull as that was the only part of the survey that was of any use. Mr. Fowden was grumpy and clearly tired and the broker from the chandlers didn't help by his non-stop chattering and continually hovering over everything he did, which to be fair, would make his job incredibly uncomfortable, but we paid him a hell of a lot of money so he should have bucked up and done the job anyway. Instead he pointed out ridiculous things and missed rather important life-threatening items. The main one of which was the 3" of corroded chimney, he wrote this in as a suggestion (the lowest level of importance listed in a standard report which means it's something you may want to get fixed at some point) rather than an urgent recommendation (something needing fixed asap, ie. before the boat is used), and despite standing next to the corroded chimney for over 20 minutes while he felt the need to point out the potential risk of leaking from the wooden windows, he said nothing about the chimney and didn't point this out to us at all. We scanned through the report for all the urgent recommendations and recommendations but knew we couldn't afford the low level suggestions at the point of purchase, so left them. We almost killed ourselves with carbon monoxide and fire risk because of this oversight, and when I went back to the surveyor to call him on this, he told me I was mistaken on how chimney's work. We had a welder who was also a qualified boat builder came and look at the chimney and confirmed, not only was it a danger of carbon monoxide but because of the level of corrosion it meant the heat was escaping onto the wooden ceiling of the boat meaning the entire boat could have gone up in flames. So no, I didn't misunderstand how chimney's worked. He simply ignore modern day health and safety and have clearly never known anyone to die from carbon monoxide, I have, so would have appreciated not having to pay you nearly 1K for you to risk my life. Of course we tried to take the complaint further but the regulatory bodies in this country are a complete joke and so he continues to provide expensive surveys with outdated health and safety ideas for others. He also missed the horrific plumbing. Mind you, he claimed his surveys were to take a visual look, with a Philips head screwdriver I discovered more in ten minutes then he did in his half a day 'investigation' and I didn't have to tear anything apart. The plumbing, which was done in a rather spaghetti style design, had a wet room style shower added to it. A more thorough look from our surveyor should have spotted that there was a whole in the floor itself next to the toilet, so the room wasn't even water tight All in all, my experience in getting a survey and buying a boat was very very poor and if I had it to do over again, I wouldn't bother with a survey at all. It'll be a long long time before I hire anyone to do any work on my boat now. Sadly it seems there are very few trustworthy people involved on the waterways, and no accountability for those who are ripping people off.
Aug 21st, 2018