New morning, new morning coffee thoughts! Yaay!!!
1) Rental properties: That's our
income stream. Contrary to above
advice, I would absolutely NOT sell them. Not just because they are our only
income stream. I'm in the superminority I think, but I would hate knowing OK, I
sold everything and now I can buy X boat and sail for 3 years and then sell it and get back to 'normal' life.... once you taste it, IF you like it, how could you ever go back?? We found an excellent property management company, and they take 7% of the income and do EVERYTHING. Handle evictions, handle
repairs (and send me 3 quotes via
email for each).... You have a guaranteed income stream in perpetuity.... as someone who might want to
cruise forever, why would you ever ditch that
security (except for rental property reasons, ie changing market to get a different rental house, etc)?
2)
Renting to
family because it's better/safer/easier? OH NO YOU DIDN'T GO THERE Please don't do that.
Family is a beautiful thing... you can rely on family for anything. Including when you're short on rent. Are you gonna be able to evict a family
member for not paying for a few months in order to finance your (to others) extravagant and entirely elective yacht lifestyle? Long and short answer: nope. So stick with strangers, be a good landlord with a good heart and a good management company, and be ready to
email them from
Belize or
Madagascar to evict that bad tenant without a second thought.
3) You must have seen the thread on here about the
batteries, right? It's huge and contentious and has a whole lot to learn from it.
4) Get both
solar and
wind rigged up, and I think you'll be fine with whatever
batteries. Topping up with distilled
water once in a while is not much
maintenance at all. An idea which we use just for convenience but you might benefit more from: get a separate little
solar panel electronics/laptop
charger. We type in the
cockpit a lot of the time, and it's just easier than running an extension cord up there. There are lots on amazon, and might be good emergency/supplemental
power for the computers...
5) Regarding
wind turbines, some are MUCH noisier than others! We've had good luck with Silentwind but haven't had much to compare it to, except what we hear at
anchor. But you need it at night and after a few cloudy days in a row...
6) Regarding boat size, we were in the bought the largest we could afford camp, with the caveat of having enough left over for
maintenance and such. Why? Because living on a 40 foot sailboat is not the same as a 50 foot, it is 10 feet longer but feels 30 feet better if you get what I mean... This is coming from someone who has also lived with my wife in a VW bus around the
med for almost a year, and loved it (ie the tiniest home you can imagine). But now that I am a bit older (40 isn't the end of the world, and the girls are only 33 and 34, but still, you creak more) and there are three of us (six if you include three teenage kittens), we need a little more space, Kitty needs an office (which y'all might appreciate too), Cristina needs a sundeck, I need
storage space for 2000 bottles of prosecco, blah blah. If you feel immediately cramped and ducking around inside a small boat, you (or worse, your partner) might get turned off real fast. I understand it's more prudent to try something small and
cheap to see if you like it, but we bought the 53footer as our first boat because we've sailed a bit before, and sort of knew ourselves well enough to be able to anticipate that we would love it and love the adventure. And seven months in, that's been the case so far. And yes, I have known a guy who bought a 50 foot
Jeanneau as his very first boat with ZERO sailing experience. Got an instructor to teach him how to sail on that exact boat, and is happily puttering around the
Med right now. He did half-crush his hand starting out, but he's better now, and I'm sure smarter for the experience of not fending off with your own body
7) Hell yes, you are doing great for your age, you should be proud. Sure some people have been sailing and living on a boat since age 7, but those are as lucky in a different way as you (and me) who could get our hands on a boat way before
retirement age
Equally lucky, just differently.
8) Oh yeah,
electronics.... I listed some before that are fun and have worked so far, not much else to add... most important
electronics at the moment is the bread machine
But seriously, we do have 2 of the two most important electronics systems in my limited opinion: plotter and
autopilot, both standalone and separated for redundancy. Yes you can use an
iPad to plot, yes you can hand steer, but you don't want to have to do either on a long
passage. Good sound system,
christmas lights,
movie projector up, big flatscreen below....make the place feel like home! It's not electronics, but a good
watermaker... not
cheap but wow, having unlimited freshwater is amazing.
9) Go read an anchor thread
If you don't have a new gen anchor on whatever you get, get one.
Mantus,
Rocna. They seem interchangeable but we have
Rocna. Again, I haven't anchored with all kinds in all
weather, but I do have enough experience to say this:
Anchoring gear is your most important piece of
gear, period.
Anchoring with a sub-par or older style anchor can be fiddly, take multiple tries, and can put your boat at risk of complete destruction (and others near you) when it plows a furrow thru the anchorage. Won't matter what kind of batteries you have if you skimp on your
rode and anchor setup if you end up on a beach. For cruising get the biggest authentic new gen type you can afford and fit on the bow, and sleep well at night. And with our Rocna, I can plop that sucker down almost anywhere on any ridiculous
scope, back it down at 3/4 rpms, and it sticks like tick. That said, be smart and use 1:5 if you have room, and dive on it if you're gonna leave the boat for any decent length of time
11) Since I have a little coffee left, I'll say at least check out Amels. I always bore people with this, and if you have read above you know it's our first and only boat, so it's stupid to listen to me as I have a sample size of 1. But it is such a damn fine boat in terms of quality for
money, space and layout and
safety and ease of sailing, I can't imagine what could beat it. You won't win races, but you will trundle to the ends of the earth in comfort, for as little as 160,000....Massive
storage space.... It reminds me of our old VW, slow and steady and always starts on the first crank. Ours is a 1991 Super Maramu, but the older Mangos, Santorins and Maramus are all fantastic once you upgrade them, and really, dirt cheap compared to lots out there. Kitty wrote about ours a bit on the website (in sig line) and there are photos there and on FB. You'll either love it or hate it, so at least it'll be an easy option to
rule in or out. Also the only sailboat we found of that size with a proper queen-sized sundeck aft. The girls (and the cats) do love their sun
Right, that'll do for now! Off I go to read that
battery thread some more and try to learn something....
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