I am looking at buying a boat that seems to have been in salt water its whole life. Its a 2002 and the Bravo 2 drives are pretty corroded not to the point of a problem but they definately need to be resurfaced and repainted.

Would it be likely that the engines are going to have problems from corrosion later? The boat only has 270hrs so the boat probably just sat at a dock which caused most of the corrosion. The rest of the boat is in great shape and looks to have been well taken care of. My main concern is the engines and drives.

I am going to have the boat surveyed and checked out completely but I obviously can't open the engines up to see what they look like.

What else can I do to make sure I'm not buying a boat the will need serious work in the future?

I boat on lake erie so the boat would most likely never see salt water again. Is salt water really that bad for boats?

if you pull the hoses off that should give you a idea on what the inside of the engines look like..if it has closed cooling even better,just look in the heat exchanger for corrosion..also look closly at the externapl parts of the engines and see how much rust their is..if theirs alot of it i would take a pass on it and look for another boat..