Cruising pre-children - worth the opportunity cost??

[JPA Cate]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Wow, good on you Sparx! Great post! I completely agree.

OP, atoll, a CF member here, grew up on a cruising boat, too, and snow petrel did as a teenager. There may be more, lurking, too.

Cheers, Jaxxzz, carpe diem.

Ann

[mbhouston]

My son is nearing 2 years old. I took my first ASA course when he was a few months old. I bought a Catalina 30 when he was 1. I had the grand vision of sailing down the Texas coast learning the cruising ropes. I joined the local cruising club to learn from those with real experience. I wanted my wife and son to learn sailing and get into the cruising mindset along with me as we prepared for a true cruise. I really wanted to do the 1 year sabbatical cruise.

Well the reality for us set in fairly quickly. I've been on boats since I was 4, but no sailing experience. My wife had no boating experience at all. I learned quickly that it would take me a few years to become a skipper with enough experience to trust with my family's lives, and would take equally as long for my wife to get comfortable on the water and learn to skipper the boat. I've seen blogs and YouTube channels where a couple buys a boat and sail into the sunset with minimal experience. I bought into it but it just wasn't realistic for us.

My son is a toddler and needs constant attention. We sail for 2 hours daysailing, get home and we are exhausted. I have no idea how we could manage this while he is completely dependent on one of us to watch him. I know others make it work and have raised families on boats. Unless you have lived the lifestyle, I personally think it is a massive leap of faith to think a family with no real cruising experience will easily convert to the lifestyle. It is easy to get caught up in the dream, I sure did.

So I would recommend that you cruise now if the time is right for you. Perhaps you decide the life is great and you want kids to live that life. I think I t would be much easier in that case to stick with that plan than doing what we were attempting. Or perhaps you have a kid and you have one of those significant emotional events where you realize your best course of action is to stick with the good paying jobs while plumping up the kitty for early retirement...Hint to my last paragraph...

So we took a step back and re-evaluated our priorities. Giving up the short term cruising dream pushed us to focus hard on financial independence and leaving the 8-5 world as soon as possible when our son is old enough to really absorb the travel experiences. In the mean time, we will slowly wade towards the sailing "deep end." This was the best course of action for us.

Good luck!

[Aahj]

This is a great thread. I feel like my wife and I are in the same exact situation and point in our lives. We still don't know if we want kids yet. The dream for me is to live aboard a cat and sail the world. I feel like we need to start making decisions now that will affect the rest of our lives going forward.

Great responses from all. I appreciate it as well.

I'm also glad I found this forum!

AJ

[barnakiel]

I would simply make the kids up first, now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternal_age_effect

Otherwise mind plenty of people cruise with their children. Cruising with children or not is more of a cultural thing than anything. Very popular with e.g. the French but quite less common elsewhere.

Cheers,
b.

[GordMay]

Greetings and welcome aboard the CF, AJ.

[B00B00]

There is that old saying-
Don't ever put off what you can do today, because if you do it and you like it, you can do it again tomorrow.......

I would be going now for sure. You are still young so don't need to rush into kids just yet. I also think if you are even debating it then certainly kids can wait for a year or 2. There is time to both. I'm assuming your wife is similar age?
I would be just doing a year or so, maybe the med season, an Atlantic rally then the Caribbean. I reckon you will be ready go home for a while then anyway. Maybe look at buying a boat big enough to accommodate a family and start working on setting it up now for the long haul. Trust me once you have a boat fully cocked and setup it's hard to part with it to have to do it all a few years later. It's a huge task both financially and time consuming to get a boat to a state you feel comfortable taking your family on for extended trips. Then you can go home back to your job make money and babies (much more fun than making money) and do some seasonal cruising to get the kids eased into it and eventually move on board for another stint for a few years. I have seen too many people leave it too long and then never be able to do it for a number of reasons (personal health, health of close family and friends financial issues, having kids that have severe disabilities ect) then also think that this whole planet is getting more unstable by the day, not just the eco system but society is crumbling in a lot of places. Who knows when it will be that the the idea of cruising offshore with just family is considered just way too dangerous with piracy, violence and corruption taking hold in a lot of places. Is it 200 years away, 50 years away or just 10 years away? Who knows but I think it's inevitable that it will happen eventually as the inequality gap widens between the rich and the poor.
Also chuck in another scenario, you might end up struggling to even have kids and spend a huge amount of time and money at the fertility clinic. We had friends who had that problem and it took almost 10 years and i dont know how many hundred thousand to have a kid and now they are going through it again with #2. It has basically shaped the last decade off them.
Sorry that all sounded doom and gloom but just trying to paint another picture.

I also think that afer a year on the boat now, you will get back to work and have a lot more drive and be more successful anyway. You will have around a year to work your ass off before you would become a family man and your priorities change a huge amount.

I think the best age for kids on a boat is 4 to about 12 years old. Under 4 and they need quite a bit if supervision and the boat life can be restricting at times as you can't really let them go off the boat by them selves so their back yard is on the size of the boat.

We have just packed up out family and moved on board for a couple of years. Brought a 2007 beneteau oceanis 50. Currently 8 weeks into a 13,000nm 1.5 year adventure half way around the world. In Palma right now doing a bit of work on the boat before the Atlantic crossing. Im 39 and my wife just turned 40, 3 kids ages 4, 7 and 9.
We sold up to do it, put half aside in investments and the rest on the boat and trip, we had much less that you though.
Before this we have cruised extensively around NZ with the kids from when they were little. Weeks at a time with a new born, 2 year old and 4 year old on a 28fter.

And also I was brought up living on a boat from the age of 8 years old with my 4 brothers (one of them is snow petrel on these forums).

[JeffBurright]

Two cents here. My wife and I left for a 2-year cruise when I turned 30 and she was 29. Same as you, we wanted to take advantage of that window of time before kids to have an adventure. We ended up stretching it to 3 years because we were doing all right financially and we were too far from home to want to hustle back and be exhausted from the continuous travel. It was an amazing time together, and lots of the retired sailors we met told us that we were doing it right to be sailing when we were still young enough to be able to punish our bodies.

By the time we accounted for the monthly costs, repairs, and reselling the boat at a discount, we estimate that the total trip cost around $50K. This was on an older 30' boat and living pretty simply in Latin America, so YMMV. It also doesn't count the opportunity cost, but there was value in doing what we wanted to be doing during this window of time. Our trip also undoubtedly cost us less overall because we were younger and we could stand fewer comforts in our boat, and we didn't take lavish excursions shoreside. (I know there are plenty of minimalist older cruisers, but our general observation was that older=more comforts=more expensive.)

One time at a bar in Panama, the proprietor heard our story and said, "No, you're doing it all backwards. If you had waited longer, you wouldn't have to go back." I'm still on the fence about whether cruising is something I could do forever. Is it an end of itself, or is it just a season of our lives?

When we were heading back, I decided to apply to grad school and switch directions toward ocean management (funny how that happens). Ironically, if I hadn't been on our trip I probably wouldn't have gotten in with the funding I got, so the trip earned me money and opportunity indirectly. That said, there has been an opportunity cost from not working a standard career for 5 years, and I expect those chickens will come home to roost when I want to retire. Whatever happens then, sailing the early-thirties window didn't land us in the poor house, but neither do I expect to live my golden years in luxury.

My wife found a job relatively quickly on our return and jumped back into her career. She's been pretty focused on getting her feet under her in her new role, so between that and me being in school it delayed the kids thing even longer. Now I'm 35 and we still haven't started a family, though it's on the near horizon. We have a 10 year plan where we think we might head off again with kids, but we'll have to see what we think when we get to that point. I wonder if the parental health thing will be a big determiner around then.

It's strange to think of those 3 years spent on the ocean as just memories now, wrinkles in our brains. Some of the ways the trip changed us have stuck, while others have faded away as we adapted back to our old environment. I think the biggest parts I keep are the memory of all the crazy situations my wife and I figured our way out of together, and the confidence that comes from knowing what you can survive. There are also occasionally these weightless moments where I can close my eyes and be back on night watch miles offshore under a warm starry sky with dolphins streaking bioluminescent trails in our wake, and the memory makes me happy.

Good luck to you on this decision. If I could do it all over again I would, but that might be because I am stupid. I'll close with a piece of advice from John Steinbeck: "Trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice, once to make mistakes and once to correct them."

Signed,
Future 'Old Dad'

[jkleins]

We did just this 22 years ago. Left the west coast of the US and sailed to the East Coast. We were heading around the world but we just didn’t want to go that fast so changed plans and went through Panama.
Two years later we went back to the professional world and for the next 20 years lived our lives. We changed our mind about kids and decided against it. Now we are back living on a boat and retired early (mostly because we could invest all those child expenses :-) )
Looking back we always thought that two years was worth whatever we had to do to do it. It grounded us in a way ours peers did not experience and changed our view about what was important and what was not. It does slow down career advancement but we wouldn’t do it any differently if we were back in that situation.
Good luck choosing. You can have too many things but I doubt you can have too many experiences. Cruising before career was certainly one we have cherished.

Jim

[roverhi]

Go now. Cruising when you are younger was the greatest experience of our lives. We decided to go cruising when I was 30 and wife 27. Bought a Westsail 32 kit and launched it in a year. Spent another year finishing up the details and cruising SoCal befpre heading off to SoPac. Had a wonderful year cruising French Polynesia. Somehow wife got pregnant, haven't figured that one out. Decided to head back supposedly to Seattle to have the baby rather than continue to NZ and contiunue cruising. The only thing I regret about our trip is that we didn't buy a completed boat and head out a year or two earlier. My wife is a special ed. teacher had her head filled with the complications with the child for a women over 30 when she got her Masters. It really wasn't a surprize that we (she) started a family when we did.

Raising a family and making a living took up the next 25 years or so. Stayed on the boat for a short while after the birth of our son but it wasn't working out partially because we didn't have a live aboard suitable berth where we wanted to live and the complicatons of raising an infant. Kept the boat for another 6 years but largely found that raising a family and making a living didn't leave time for the boat.

The shore side hiatus actually worked out well for us. It gave us the opportunity to establish our careers and prepare for retirement. Something that probably wouldn't have happened if we'd continued cruising. Hard to get invested in a pension while you are out at sea.

Raising very young children is a challenge onshore that I wouldn't want to do on a boat till they are old enough to be responsible for their lives. Once they are old enough to understand the dangers and keep themselves afloat if they should fall in would be my determining factor for cruising with kids. The families that we met out cruising with children older than 5 or so had a great time. The kids would make friends with the local kids at each anchorage which would be an entre into the lives of the locals for the parents. Made for a much richer experience than us childless cruisers.

Unfortunately now that we are retired, wife has decided that cruising is not something she wants to do. Golf and Pickle Ball are now her passions. I got the sailing bug and bought a boat 12 years ago that I single handed to our home in Kona. Also have a Sabre 28 in Oceanside, CA that I hope to get the Grandkids into sailing with.