I am currently looking at purchasing a J/30. A few of the boats that I have seen have loose lifeline stansions with cracked fiberglass around the base. I am trying to figure out what I would be looking at time and money wise, as well as potential long term problems with deck integrity due to these weak spots.

Any help is appreciated.

Are you seeing actual cracked fiberglass or just stress cracks in the gelcoat? The later is prevalent since the stantions are mounted in an uncored solid glass portion of the deck. I have hull #359 built in 1982. It has the typical stress cracks in the gelcoat. The stantions do move some but only because of the design with a base that is separate from the post.

From personal experience, find the boat with the least amount of problems. You'll be happy you did. Unless you like working on boats all the time, that is.

Well I don't know about the replys. I have hull #44 St. Elmo's Fire. A friend of mind had it before me and had to do some extensive work on one of the stantions. I found all of the stantions seem to have insufficient backing plates for the purpose. One of my job things is to redo all the stantion backing plates with as large as I can fit along with resealing them.
I'm a full sized guy and I don't trust them as they are.

Well, don't worry about the loose stanchions, it is an easy fix. I had the same problems on Black Magic. The mountion plate for the stanchions has 4 bolts. 2 of the bolts connect through solid glass, nothing to do here but calk and tighen. The inboard two holes actual are on the fringe of the balsa core. When I removed the bolts, the core was damp. I just took a bent nail removed approx 2 inch, then filled with the West system, redrilled the holes and bolted up. No problem.

I have #272; I raced w/two big guys 250 & 285lbs doing genoa p& s this summer and found as the season ended my forward cockpit stanchions worked loose from the bug guys climbing out to the rail; the solution is not necssarily and under deck repair - my boat has plastic backing plates - obviously not sufficient - I had a local machine shop make some bases of 1/4" stainless steel about the same base size as the stanchion base but 4" deeper on the inboard end - they are havey(weighing about 4lbs each) but provide a larger surface area to spread the load as my crew moves onto the windward rail - cost for 4 pieces was Cdn$138/USD$90....