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just wanted to share my idea

3K views 28 replies 20 participants last post by  PPPPPP42 
#1 ·
so i'm 15 years only and ive always thought about living on a sailboat and not my goal is that when i'm 18 to move out and onto a sailboat by myself or with girlfriend if have one at the time. so just wonder around how much would it cost to do this? cheaper than living on shore?compared to a ( appartment/ house). whats it like to live on a sailboat? i sail my little sailboat every chance i get but just wondering.
 
#2 ·
Seems to me your allready on that path , and ya it's going to cost you all you make just like liveing on land and going to the rat race everyday it also takes all you can make ;)..

Chin up life is short and you are doing what you like ,IMHO you can't loose .

Good luck in your endevors !
 
#3 ·
At 18, you don't want to be living with a girlfriend bud. Have her over, sure, but don't let her mover in. You've got three years to learn to sail, look at boats, read, talk to naval architects, etc... When you're 18, you'll have a much better idea of want will work for you. While you're thinking about all that, figure out a career that can help you pay for your dreams and give you time to pursue them! :)
 
#4 ·
If you are now 15, focus on school and when you are 18, go to college and get a good education. Developing your mind is more important at your age than GF or sailing. The ocean will be there when you are 64.

When you stay in school, it does not mean you can't go sailing. Oh yeah, stay home to save money. You have a whole life time ahead of you to live alone.

Be smart and be patient. Education makes learning everything easier down the road including sailing. Develop your critical thinking skills may save your life in the ocean.

:)
 
#5 ·
rockDAWG has good advice, even if as a 15y/o it seems kinda dull. Besides, a fine young filly isn't going to want to live on a stinky little old sailboat with you (and I don't think you'd want her there either! You really don't want women to lose all their mystery quite that young :D )
 
#6 ·
The trick to living well and enjoying life is to find what you're good at. I'm fortunate that I'm paid well to do it. This way, I can pay someone good at building boats to build one for me.

There are many ways to build a sailboat. Of the many ways to do it, finishing school has to be among the very best. The perks aside -- college girls; college sailing programs -- you don't have to commit too early. Nobody gets rich building sailboats. Keep a few options open. Finish school. Buy your boat, hopefully not built by the lowest bidder fumbling through his first attempt.
 
#21 ·
There are many ways to build a sailboat. Of the many ways to do it, finishing school has to be among the very best. The perks aside -- college girls; college sailing programs -- you don't have to commit too early. Nobody gets rich building sailboats. Keep a few options open. Finish school. Buy your boat, hopefully not built by the lowest bidder fumbling through his first attempt.
It's interesting what folks read into a sentence. Where did that come from?? Who said anything about building a sailboat?

And how does living on a boat stop one from developing your mind, going to college, getting a great job, running for president?

Having said that, I agree with most of the sentiment above. Life was great when I lived with my folks. Stay there for as long as you can and if there are things that you want to do that you can't do at home, take your girlfriend to the boat for as long as it takes. Then go back home. :p
 
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#7 ·
Almost 1/2 the world is made up with women. You're too young to even be thinking about living with anybody other than your parents.

But as others have advised---- you need either a solid formal education that includes college or a training for a trade. If you fail to prepare yourself with a trade or education, you most likely will end up at the bottom of the social heap with no boat, no money and a cardboard room on the street. Think about it.

Boats, water and women will always be there.
 
#8 ·
Trying to answer your questions



Ok - small boat lover. The Olde Salts here are great at giving unsolicited advice, even if most of it is pretty good. :rolleyes: I'll go in a different direction and give you the answers you asked for, rather than the ones I think you need. :laugher

First - how much does it cost? Well, that depends on how much you want to spend. If you are willing to camp on a 19' West Wight Potter, the cost can be very low. For example, the minimum slip fee off of Pier 37 in San Francisco is under $400 for housing in San Francisco at the waterfront is unheard of. With that you get showers, electricity, and toilet facilities, but you're walking to a shower, and your boat has no onboard head, just a hand-emptied porta-john. The galley is a one burner propane stove and a cooler chest. (So add approx $3.00/day for ice if you want cold drinks.) It's definitely living on the cheap and primitive. Such a boat cost me $15,000 used. (You can find one for less, but it was THE boat, and I wanted it) If you get a larger boat, you can get one with more systems, but then the maintenance costs go up month to month and season to season.

For a used live aboard, I estimate you will need between $20,000 - $35,000 to get a boat in decent working condition and get it transported to where you need it. Annual maintenance, assuming you are daysailing in comfortable weather and not cruising come hell or high water, will probably run $2000 - $5000 a year, depending on how hard you work to keep up with the failing systems. (Water hates boats.) Depending on where you are, your slip fees can run anywhere from $75 - $1200 a month.

So cost wise, to sum up, once you've paid for the boat, it costs about what it costs to live in an efficiency apartment, if you stick with a small, simple boat.

Now - what's it like? Well, I've never lived aboard. I've just done a little cruising on vacations. For one thing, it's crowded. There's never enough room for everything. Your desktop computer needs to turn into a laptop. Your book collection needs to turn into a kindle. Your workshop needs to turn into a tool box. And there's never, ever, anywhere you can park your car for free, let alone your trailer.

It's hot, except when it's cold. Unless the boat's got onboard AC/heating, it's a constant job managing the temperature. It's damp. Even if the hull doesn't sweat or leak, it's going to be humid.

Oooh! Play guitar? Find yourself a cheap crappy one. Do NOT take a nice wooden musical instrument on a boat long term. The humidity and temperature changes are bad for them.

Don't get me wrong - I love being on my boat so much that I will drive 40 minutes to the marina and just sit in the cockpit, drink a little rum, and dream of tropical islands, even when I don't have time to sail. I sleep well aboard - the motion of the boat at dock or anchor rocks me to sleep. Girls seem to like to sail - that's for sure. But below deck, they like their comfort, so if you're living on a small boat, try to select for companions with a spirit of adventure.

So - if this is something you REALLY want to do, you've got a lot of research ahead of you, and a lot of hard work to earn the money to pay for it.

I've tried to answer your questions, given my experience. Let me know if you want my advice.
 
#9 ·
I sleep well aboard - the motion of the boat at dock or anchor rocks me to sleep. Girls seem to like to sail - that's for sure.
Just wanted to point out. Spooning is great with the rocking motion of the boat. But the pumping during close encounter is always out sync with the boat rocking motion. :p May be others have better luck or I need more practices. :laugher:laugher:laugher
 
#11 ·
thanks every one. well right now i have a 16' sailboat no cabin the next boat i want in a year or two before i'm 18 is a 18-23' so i get use to the size and controling it. If i ever get the chance i would want to live on a 29-36' sailboat. or a catamaran sailboat they seem a lot more roomy
 
#19 ·
thanks every one. well right now i have a 16' sailboat no cabin the next boat i want in a year or two before i'm 18 is a 18-23' so i get use to the size and controling it. If i ever get the chance i would want to live on a 29-36' sailboat. or a catamaran sailboat they seem a lot more roomy
The bigger sailboat is much easier to sail than the smaller sailboat.
 
#12 ·
Going to college may or may not be the right thing to do. Don’t we all know kids with six figure college debt, useless degrees and working at the mall?

If you are interested in a profession (Dr. Lawyer, Engineer, etc) then of course you need the training. But if not and you like working with your hands then learning a trade may be a lot more useful to you. Pick something that you like and that you can do anywhere and you will have a lot of choices in life.

Course if you really want to live on a boat and get paid to do it there is always the Navy!

Good luck!
 
#13 ·
Life is short and you really never know what you will come your way. You are young and you at least have a vision, more than can be said for most teenagers these days. If living on a boat is what you desire than go for it!

It can be cheaper than rent. if you own the boat outright then you will just be paying slip fees, if you are in marina. I pay 250 per month, liveaboard would be 375. Not too many places in Hampton Roads can be had with the view i have at the marina for 375!

if i can offer my advice, stay debt free! save and buy things with good old cash. if you do this you will be much happier than the poor guy working 9-5 paying for a 3 yrs old car with soda stains that isn't worth the gas he puts in it. 25 yrs old house that needs just as much maintenance as the boat!

material things, cash , career, bigger boat....... with not bring you the happiness you enjoy right now on your 16ft boat! keep it simple!


Good luck and keep your sails full!
 
#14 ·
The Catalina 22 would be a decent starter boat that you could sleep 2 on and put on a trailer. CAPRI 22 (CATALINA) sailboat on sailboatdata.com.. More than 6000 sailboats, sailing yachts, dinghies and sailing craft listed.
The Montgomery has a devoted following as well but is generally more expensive: MONTGOMERY 17 sailboat on sailboatdata.com.. More than 6000 sailboats, sailing yachts, dinghies and sailing craft listed.
Save your money because even older boats aren't really all that cheap and free boats are never really free.
Do your boat research now and get aboard as many different sized sailboats as you can before you decide to buy anything.
Above all, enjoy yourself, finish school and plan ahead.
 
#15 ·
College is an option, but it's not always the answer. Keep your options open. Life is going to bring to you many options, and if you're lucky you will choose a good one, or two. I barely managed high school, and yet I have managed to live a very fulfilled life.

If you think you want to live aboard then get something you can walk around in. Sure a 22ft. boat sounds exciting at first, because it is easier to buy. Try walking around for a week hunched over, or even an hour. With room to walk around you will have room for more than one pair of jeans, and one stinky t-shirt. Even in a fat 30 ftr you will have limited posessions.

There will be time for the opposite sex. I wouldn't worry about moving one aboard. Many men give up their dream, because it doesn't fit the girl friend's dream of a white picket fence, and a knight in shining armor. Your life is meant to be explored, and enjoyed. What will you do with a baby 6 months after the girl moves in, and you have to tell your parents she is pregnant? Think with the big head, and not the little one!:rolleyes:

You want to build a boat? Build a rowing dinghy that you can sail. Might cost $500, but it will be there when you get a bigger boat. You will want to get to shore! It is very possible to become rich building boats. Why do you think there are so many manufacturers? Building the dink will give you some experience. You can build one, and sell. Then build a larger one, and sell it. Anything is possible. It was once a dream to put man on the moon too! Maybe at 25 you can build a world cruising cat?

What ever you do be true to yourself, and the right girl will come along in life. Don't throw your dreams , and life away for a little satisfaction that is over in a short time. It took me 50 years to find the right woman for me. In between were a couple of divorces, and way too many girlfriends.:mad:

There is no hiway 1 to get through life. Life is a matter of a mountain road full of switch backs, upgrades, and downgrades. Learn to accept that, and push through your problems. Accept the responsibility of your decisions. Don't be a whiner like most of today's kids Alway listen to advice, and then toss most of it out the window. Some of it will be precious, but most is what someone else thinks. Mine included too.

Accomplishments start with a dream, but nothing gets done unless you act on them. The sooner you act the sooner it comes true. If life knocks you down. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and push forward with no whining. Hard work with a book, or your hands will see you through life.........i2f
 
#17 ·
I wish I'd have had your vision at 15. I spent my life chasing girls, then later women. Do what you dream of and the woman of your dreams will be right next door. Pick the girl first and the dream will never happen
I'll be 64 in 3 weeks. I rather regret the life I didn't spend sailing.
Learn a trade you can ply in marinas and boat yards worldwide. Naval electronics, fiberglass repair, enen welding. Carry your tools.
You can get paid to learn this kind of stuff in the Navy. Try to get an iron-clad guarantee from the recruiter.
 
#18 ·
Father said it many moons ago:
You can go as for as your vision takes you.

USAF said:
Aim High

Me said:
Always live on the top of the food chain. At the bottom of food chain, life sucks.

Jack London said:
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

This is a great country, free to choose your path and happiness. But choose wisely.

Peace :)
 
#23 ·
Living aboard a small boat has it's benefits, but it is a lot like camping. If you can live a tent for a week and love it.....

Then you will enjoy living aboard a boat
 
#25 ·
Either college or Navy sounds like a good choice. I did 4 years in the Navy on a submarine then got a two year college degree. I now own a couple of small taxi businesses and still drive cab on call from my house 80 hours in 5 days. I've got a family now. Because of the bum economy in the US , college grads right now are struggling and competing hard with each other for jobs. Maybe the Navy would be a wise choice. I am so happy that I served. Living in the small boat is a nice idea as long as you are not squandering your youth neither going to college nor starting your own company or branding your own product or service.It would be far cheaper than renting a small apartment waterfront. I lived in the back of a 4 cylinder pickup with a shell then graduated to a 4 cylinder Toyota Dolphin motorhome later on during college. I never once paid even one penny of rent after I got out of the Navy until I got married and bought my first home. This was called boondocking and I did it for 2 years. Now I am working towards paying off 3 houses. If I can keep up this pace I should be mortgage free at age 57. Be industrious as you enjoy living on the boat- don't squander your most energetic years. I squandered 8 years and only worked driving cab 1-2 days a week after my 4 years in the Navy. I am still glad that I went to college even though it was not necessary for owning cabs and properties. Just do something productive. Don't ever get a woman preggers unless you are in love with her and willing to marry her and be a good father to your children. Don't become a deadbeat Dad. I was the breadwinner at age 12 so nose to the grindstone work has served me well. If you are a lazy bum when you are young you may live like a bum when you are older because you weren't fruitful when you had the most energy. I don't think that living on the sailboat is a bad idea, I think it is a good one. Then you can sail anytime you want, even after work in the summer. Good luck
 
#26 · (Edited)
you could spend you life aquiring burdens

As Curtis recommends, but I would vote against it.
If you want to live aboard in a harbor or marina, then you can live just like on land, get any kind of education or job that appeals to you and still have waterfront property on all four sides and no lawn to mow.
We old geezers have made a lot of assumptions about you from one brief post. Do you mean you want to cruise? Get a copy of Annie Hill's Voyaging on a Small Income. She, (with a couple of husbands) has cruised hundreds of thousands of miles with very little money. Today, in her mid or late fifties she lives in New Zealand, on or very near her small junk rigged boat Fantail. She still doesn't have a lot of money but she's as happy as most people and happier than many. (She's a regular poster on junkrigassociation.org, as am I.)
Lyn and Larry Pardy, Cap'n Fatty Goodlander... there are many people spending their lives cruising. Me, I'm an old f*rt dragging around too much baggage and gaining nothing from most of it.
P.S. If you do get Annie's book, please buy a legit copy of it from Amazon or somewhere, or at least get it from tor library if they have it. That's free and still honorable. Her text has escaped into the wild on the internet and can be downloaded for free. She did the work and deserves the royalties.
 
#28 ·
"and when you are 18, go to college and get a good education."
A college education can be useful but you can also save $100-200,000 by skipping it and apprenticing as a plumber or an electrician and earning money in those years instead of spending it. More money than most college grads will make, unless they go on to advanced degrees or running businesses instead of being employees in offices. Or McD's.
Which is not to say there's any one best path--just that there are many options to consider. A good trade, which doesn't have to compete with Indian IT workers overseas. Or the military. Sure, people try to kill you but the benefit packages can actually be pretty good. And there just MUST be some military program that trains plumbers, too.<G>

Living on a boat kinda precludes the college residential dorm experience and restricts your choice of colleges to those near boats. A good plumber can always take four years off and get the degree later.

The economics of living on a boat, much less owning one? I wonder what a Statistics-101 class could dig up on that, and how widely their numbers would diverge. "Your mileage may vary!"
 
#29 ·
Ok I just wrote like 5 pages then deleted it, since what you were really asking is: "I want to live on a boat when I am 18, how do I make that happen?"

I was a marine mechanic for 5 years and I can tell you that is the best job for a person living on a sailboat, you can basically live at your work so you don't spend money getting to work, and usually as an employee at the marina you will get a cheaper slip rental with good opportunities to buy a slip.

Something to understand about the marine industry is that you don't have to go to a school ahead of time. Once a dealer has paid their yearly dealer fees, they can send their techs to school for free at the manufacturer training sites, along with a lot of online and at dealer training. The hardest part is getting your foot in the door to get a job at a marina.

You will want to move, unfortunately you will have to be in an apartment for the first part of this plan. You need to be living near the areas where the training centers are located, ideally Mercury marine since they do I/O's and inboards and those huge pod drives now, along with the traditional outboards. As I recall they are all in Georgia, Keenesaw is Yamaha, I forget where mercury put theirs. There are other training sites like the ones in eastern WI but those only do limited stuff.
The reason for moving near the training site to find a dealer to work at is so you can drive to the classes every day from home, that means that the dealer who has already paid their yearly dues, can send you for free, even if you are just an entry level boat washer or something. If they had to pay airfare or hotel or basically anything, they probably wouldn't bother.
The classes start very basic (fundamentals of 2 stroke and 4 stroke engines, electrical theory) so you don't need to really know anything ahead of time, but it really helps to have basic mechanical experience.
Once you have been to enough classes you can move into a mechanics position. I have found that only by being a marine mechanic can you learn to be a marine mechanic, it takes years of experience. Once you have maybe 5 years of experience and lots of certifications, you will be able to move around to the marina of your choice.

As far as a boat goes, move up to a 22 footer that is trailerable next, they can be had for pocket change or free if you are very patient. Fixing a worn out but complete boat isn't expensive, its very cheap, its just super labor intensive and most people don't have skills.
Don't bother going any bigger and just save up until you are ready to move onto a boat (good mechanic job and live aboard marina) then get something 30+ feet that is nicely equipped and has a design you can live with.

DO NOT LIVE WITH ANYONE ON A BOAT. That's my best advice unless you have lived with someone in a one bedroom apartment (or better yet a studio apartment) for years and know it works, plus it would have to be one of those rare females that likes the crude sailboat life since you cant live in a space that small with someone you're not sleeping with.

So to summarize how to make your dream work:
1. Beg your way into any job at a marina that is a Mercury repair center that pays enough for you to get an apartment with a roommate or something. Must be near the Mercury Marine training facility so you can convince them to send you to the part of week or week long classes for free (probably with no pay). Negotiate that point before you are hired and tell them you want to eventually be a mechanic. Ideally you want the marina to be a place on the water with a ramp and parking so you can trailer sail for free, but if a land locked repair center is all you can get it will do.
The alternative to mechanic would be to find some way into the fiberglass and gel coat repair world at a marina with slips, but that's a foreign country to me.

2. Do whatever sailing you want and can afford until you have made it into a mechanic job and done it for a number of years with the appropriate training certifications. Then save up and pick out a nice 30+ foot boat.

3. Take your good job and if the marina you started at isn't a good place to live aboard, move to a place that is and work where you live.

Sounds simple enough eh? :)
 
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