I am suppose to go up there this Weekend to look at it. It is a 7 hour drive one way.

Here is a picture of the boat.

Nice looking, Is this your first boat ? Im not trying to discourage you from buying it but we've seen so many get burned in the past, hope it works out..........where is it ? maybe someone on the here could take a peek before you make the trip

Did he supply any other pictures of the boat? You can tell a LOT by how the engine bay is maintained...if clean and neat and well-organized, you can have some confidence the rest of the boat was maintained well, too. Is the interior in good shape? All electronics working? Any extras of the long list that Baja offered for options during this build period?
Was it always stored indoors? How long did the current owner have it? Doesn't sound like too long, from what you describe. Why is he selling?

Like a lot of members here, I've helped many, many people get into boating. There are a lot of good/great looking boats out there that are time bombs waiting to fail/cost you a lot of money. But for $20K, you could feel good even if you had to sink...I dunno...another $8K into it. Where I live, this would be a $30K - $32K boat easily. There just aren't any used boats to buy...definitely a seller's market.

Thus would be 5th boat. I had two 2004 baja's before. They were both 242 Islanders. My last boat was a 2000 Rinker 27 Fiesta Vee crusier that we sold at the beginning of the year.
Interior looks good. The back seat stitches are starting to come undone. Both bolster seats look good also and so does the rest of the interior. I think I am going to ask for a compression check and see what he says. He already volunteered to do a moisture check on the boat.

Engine bay looks clean. I will post some more pictures. Thanks everyone!!!!

Here are some more pictures.

What kind of cost, worse case scenario at some point I need a new motor, 502 or 496 HO?

Sorry, one last question. What kind of numbers are good compression test numbers for this 502? Thanks!!

Please get a non-interested party to check out transom etc.

You could easily spend 15K in engine rebuild, labor, and any surprises you find after pulling the motor.