size matters...

A very long time ago we were rafted up in Honfleur and got invited to have tea and cookies on a Westerly Tiger. It's a nice memory of a half-dozen people chatting about boats inside a very nice, small boat.

As it happens, I saw a Westerly Tiger for sale up in Seattle for $1K and a lot of my positive reaction to the boat is related to that one evening of drinking tea, eating biscuits, and pleasant conversation.

I mention this because most people feel a 25-foot boat is far too small for any sort of cruising and should be just for day-sailing and the occasional weekend at anchor. I'll even go along with them and suggest that if carrying around a lot of  'stuff' is an important part of your cruising style, then a 25-foot boat is not going to work for you.

On the other hand, if you're on a budget, a 25-footer is going to cost you a whole lot less to buy, cruise, and maintain than a bigger boat.

Size matters.

One of the reasons you see so many nice boats selling for not a lot of money is the simple fact that marina and associated costs are nuts in most places. So they go on the market because the outgoing costs are greater than the value of owning a boat they only use once in a while. A situation so bad, in fact, that far too often it makes more sense to give away a boat to stop the associated hemorrhage of money.

The problem, of course, is that cruising boats of any size are not a great vehicle to sit in a marina and run up bills. They're designed to cruise.

While it's going to cost you money to cruise, you won't have the monthly slip rent taking a huge bite out of your budget. For the most part, you'll be able to anchor, and while more and more destinations are starting to charge for anchoring, the beauty of cruising is that it's surprisingly easy to sail to places that don't. 

Maintaining a smaller boat is a lot less expensive. Looking at the cost of haul-outs and bottom paint it does not take a math genius to figure out that a couple of weeks on the hard is going to be a lot less painful than a bigger boat. Our CAL34 reminds me of that fact every time I even think about the current costs involved.

There are a lot of 25-30-foot boats that will fulfill the sleeps two, feeds four, and drinks six checklist of what you need in a small cruising boat, just like the Westerly Tiger, providing you are not addicted to carrying around copious amounts of stuff you seldom use.

Worth thinking about...

and in the "no good cheap boats out there" department...

I get a lot of email pointing out that, as far as some are concerned, a good cheap boat is nearly impossible to find. So, let's look at a good cheap boat...

The boat in question is the first boat that caught my interest in the PNW Tempest search of Craig's List for sailboats. Three things stood out.

It's a San Juan 7.7 designed by Don Clark and a boat I'm familiar with. It also happens to be located close to a relative which could have a lot of advantages. The price at $750 is cheap and it appears to be in decent shape.

One of the nice things about a sailboat that is only 25-feet is that there is very little to be wonky that needs fixing and whatever does is not going to cost silly money to sort out.

The boat is engineless but all it needs is a 5-HP outboard and a used two-stroke shouldn't cost more than $250 which brings the cost to an even $1000.

A couple of weeks of full-time labor would be all that's really needed to upgrade the interior and sort out any needful issues it might have. Say another $250-$350 in materials.

Of course, that's doing the work yourself and being able to devote 100% of your work to doing the needful jobs at hand. An important factor as fixing up a boat in a part time situation increase the time it takes by a factor of 10.

Obviously there are quite a few things I'd add to the mix (such as a pair of beaching legs) but they can all be done later as they are luxuries rather than priorities and can be done at leisure as time allows.

I'll underline that that was just the first boat that came to my attention in an area that always seems to have several good cheap boats listed.

Just sayin'

 

Simple to the max...

While not a sailboat, there's a lot to be said for this exercise in simplicity...

Anyone come across a Vespa powered sailboat?

A refit I'm watching...

 

This might be interesting...

When I lived in Paris the Super Arlequin was a sailboat that caught my interest so this web series looks like it might be interesting.

For those wanting to know more about the Super Arlequin in the meantime...

A VolksCruiser project you might want to follow...

 An Albin Ballad project worth checking out...

A simple budget...

Budgets are just a tool for organizing and taking control of your spending. A very simple budget that works is the 50/30/20 budget. So simplistic that, you might be inclined to go with something more complicated. That said, give it a try and you'll find it does the job just fine. It works like this. 

• 50% is for your basic expenses.
• 30% is for everything else.
  
• 20% goes into a project and emergency fund.

If we round off the monthly budget to the nearest round number that gives us a base of $1,500 a month. So 50% = $750, 30% = $450, and 20% = $300. Super simple and almost idiot proof.

The trick of course is just learning to live within your numbers. 

Just about everyone I know has fallen into the trap of throwing money at stuff while preparing to cruise and then continuing the process in their first year of cruising. 

Been there, done that, but couldn't afford the t-shirt because the money was all gone. Really, I should have been following a budget.

One way to make following a budget easier is that since you're on a boat you can adapt your cruising plans to areas where prices or services are more affordable. 

For instance, I really do need to haul out and put some new anti-fouling on the boat so I'm researching boatyards and haul out costs along the proposed route out of here. I've already got the paint (bought on sale at a very deep discount) and all the needful bits for the rest of the work that I might as well do once the boat is on the hard. That alone will, more than likely save me a month's budget.

While you'll have to do some research and chat up the coconut telegraph to sort out which places are affordable or not you might want to consider looking at less popular areas as a first step. The cost of things is directly related to the number of well heeled tourists, bareboat charterers, and upwardly mobile anchored condomarans. Not that some of those places are not great places to visit but you wouldn't want to provision or buy much while you're there.

Getting back to the budget thing I'll just add that cash is a wonderful thing. Sticking $500 in an envelope provides instant feedback every time you take out a couple of twenties. Nothing concentrates the mind on keeping to the budget as dwindling cash in an envelope. The envelope is also a great place to keep your receipts so at the end of the month accounting you'll have a concrete record of what you've spent.

The $1500 budget is just a number and has zip to do with your particular state of prosperity. It's at best just a way of sorting out what you can or cannot afford. Or, as Charles Dickens pointed out...

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”

 

 

The first important question...

So, here’s the big question…

What can you afford?

It doesn’t really matter what you think it costs, what other people are spending, or the relative price of tea in China. It’s all about what you can afford in the long run.

Let’s take a number out of a hat…

$18,310.

$18,310. is the current poverty line for a couple in the USA. Divide that number by twelve and you get $1,525.84. per month. A lot of folks I know would consider that a fairly comfortable full time cruising budget.

The question remains: can you live and cruise on $1,525.84 per month?

How would you budget that out? Would it affect your current lifestyle negatively? What would it have you giving up?

So many questions, so little time and dollars.

If $1,525.84. per month is too little for your needs. What amount would make a difference or what would you have to give up to make it work?

Pull some other numbers out of a hat and ask yourself the same questions. Do it until you think you have a number that makes sense for you. I know it’s hard, but try to keep the rose-colored glasses in their case and be relentlessly honest about it.

Trust me, it will pay off big time.

Next up, we’ll do an actual budget based on the $1,525.84. per month budget and whatever you might care to suggest in the comments.