Moving a yacht’s home base between Australia and New Zealand

The passage is the easy part

A base change reads like a delivery trip with paperwork attached. It is closer to the opposite. The passage is the short, well understood part, and most of what goes wrong is a contract, a document or a person whose arrangements were tied to the old base and nobody re-tied to the new one.

Work backwards from the date the vessel has to be operational on the new berth, not forwards from the day she leaves.

List what the old base is holding up

Before anything else, write down what the current base is actually carrying. On most vessels it is a good deal more than the berth:

• The berth agreement. Notice period, whether a prepaid balance is refundable or transferable, and whether the berth is a lease you can walk away from or a licence you may be able to sell.
• Insurance navigation limits. Cover is written against a cruising range, and a passage outside it needs the underwriter's written agreement first. This is the item most often left until the week before.
• Crew. Employment agreements, payroll and superannuation or KiwiSaver, the right to work in the arriving country, accommodation, and who is moving versus who is leaving.
• Warranty and service. Engine, generator and systems warranties usually run through a dealer network, and continuity can depend on the work being done by an approved yard.
• Standing suppliers. Fuel accounts, provisioning, the divers who do the hull clean, the shipwright who knows the boat.
• Customs and tax status. Whether she arrives as a temporary import or a permanent one changes what is payable and what she may do once alongside.

That last one is the one to take advice on. The regimes on each side of the Tasman are not the same, they turn on details like intended use and length of stay, and the answer belongs to a customs broker licensed in the arriving country. Get it before departure rather than on arrival, when the vessel is alongside and the clock is running.

Three months out

1. Confirm the new berth in writing, with the arrival window and the draught, beam and air draught you actually have. A berth booked against the brochure figures is a berth booked for a different boat.
2. Give notice on the old one. Diarise the notice date itself, not the departure date. Notice periods are frequently longer than the lead time people assume.
3. Open the insurance conversation. Ask for the passage endorsement and the new cruising range in one request, and ask what the underwriter wants in the way of crew experience and weather routing.
4. Start the crew paperwork. Work rights take the longest and depend least on you. Anyone who needs a visa needs it now.
5. Book the yard period if she needs one. A base change is the natural moment for survey work, and yard slots on both sides of the Tasman book out well ahead.

One month out

• Get the documents into one place. Registration, certificates, insurance, crew documents, the last survey, service records. If someone has to ask the captain for the certificate of registry while they are on passage, that is a filing problem rather than a passage problem.
• Close the loop on service history. Whoever picks up the work in the new base starts blind unless they can see what was done and when. Hours on each engine and generator, the last major services, known defects and the parts on order.
• Tell the people who bill you. Suppliers with standing arrangements should be told the last date they are working on the vessel, or you will be reading invoices for a berth she has left.

The first month on the new berth

Expect the new base to cost more attention than the old one for a quarter. Things worth watching:

• The first invoices from new suppliers. Rates agreed verbally in a different currency drift. Check the first bill from each against what was quoted.
• Anything that was inherited rather than chosen. The yard the broker recommended, the agent who handled the arrival, the contractor the marina suggested. One of them will turn out to be the wrong fit, and the sooner that is visible the cheaper it is.
• The insurance renewal that follows. The first renewal after a base change is where the new cruising range, the new berth and any survey findings all land at once.

What to hold on file afterwards

A base change is also the moment the record either gets tidied or gets lost. When it is done, the vessel's file should hold: the new berth agreement, the endorsed insurance certificate with its navigation limits, the customs entry documents, current crew documents with their expiry dates, the passage's own log and any survey or yard reports from the move.

If those live in one operating record rather than in an inbox, the next person to ask "when does that expire" gets an answer instead of a search. That is the whole argument for keeping asset records in one place: see how the operations view works, or read what to agree before she goes into the yard, which is the next large number on the same vessel.