Is this a viable and affordable plan for cruising the Med?

[mabedicha]

My plan is as follows: I buy a boat in the Med and berth in place A for a year. I sail it for two weeks in May and bring it back to A. Then in summer holiday I slowly bring it to place B where I will berth it until July the next year with some sailing in Oct and again in May. Then in summer we move to place C. This way we want to cruise the whole Med in 10 years. I am looking for Marina's close to cheap airline hubs. My question to you:
Any major faults in this plan or the major obstacles I will encounter?
Any idea's about the cost of a berth for 12 months?
Any place you recommend to use a A, B etc?
Thanks for your expert advise.

[goboatingnow]

The issue will be marina berth availability. There are places where it’s not possible to get any sort of long term berth , and once you get one you’ll be very slow to let it go. The other thing is that many areas of the Med can take way longer then a few months to explore. The Ionian alone could take you years. Don’t treat the med like a school trip. The other way might be to “ dry sail “ ie cruise and then lift out. Often lift outs are easier then berths to get.

[Dogscout]

Cost of berthing for 12 months varies greatly by place. Grand Harbour Marina in Malta will be about 4x the price of Preveza Marina in Greece. Preveza's 2020 price list shows 4513,00 plus VAT for a 13.5 meter boat as the annual cost. I also recommend seeing both places, and everywhere else. If you can only sail it for 2 weeks then pulling it out makes more sense.

As goboatingnow says you could spend alot of time in Greece, I know of one couple who spent 4 years and didnt see everything they wanted.

[Simon.Sails]

I plan to do something similar for the first year or two. Based on my prelimary research every region has some marinas which are both relatively affordable (4-6k euro/year for 10-12m boat) and has available berths.I've written some of them for quotes as well, so not just based off websites. They are usually not in the main tourism hubs, but I don't care as I just need a safe place to leave the boat.

One issue I see is why buy a boat in year 1 for just two weeks of sailing? You could charter an incredible boat for much less than your total cost that year.

But other than that it's certainly doable if you have the funds. As for flying in there really are a lot of options in Europe.

I'm sure many others have good recommendations too but personally these are the main cruising grounds I want to explore (I know them from land based travel already)

• Italian Riviera and Cote d'Azur
• Sicily, Malta, Calabria
• Croatia, Greece

Each of these has several marinas with easy access to an airport at reasonable cost.

[Pandor]

You didn’t mention where you are from. But I guess not so close to the Med. Your plan seems to be based on 2 months of summer sailing in July/August with 10 months away with the exception of a weekend or two in October and May?

I don’t see how that can possibly work. Will you be paying the marina you choose each year to look after your boat? Will maintenance be done via phone and email?

The other issue you will have is weather - both while with the boat and away. Who will check the boat during the winter? And I was thinking July and August are terrible months to try and sail the Aegean.

[AthenaB]

As a family we have bareboat chartered Greece (Ionian and Peloponnese), Croatia, Turkey, South of France and Majorca- truly you are spoiled for choice and will have a wonderful time... as has been suggested, you could easily spend long periods in any one of these areas, especially the Eastern Med.

What is your nationality, mabedicha? As Brits/South Africans with plans to retire in 2024 to commence long term live aboard life, starting in the Eastern Med, our cruising wings have just been clipped to 90/180 days due to Brexit... so bear in mind, if you are non-EU, that you will have to leave the Schengen EU waters every 90 days. That doesn’t affect your berthing in the short term plans you have (unless you plan to sail more than 90 days in any given 180 in the same area) as the boat can stay even if you can’t, but once you are up and running, long term berthing plans may be affected. Brexit has certainly forced us to review our cruising and berthing plans, although it’s not a deal breaker for our Med plans by any means... there are plenty of non-EU yachts cruising the Med, we will live mostly at anchor and we will simply plan our routes according to 90 day windows. Winter becomes more problematic if we want to berth and live in a Marina for more than 90 days, however. Your plans suggest the desire to move on to new territories regularly but remember to factor in the 90/180 rule if you are non-EU. (I’m happy to stand corrected by others who have a better handle than me on the whole issue of 90/180, but this is my understanding to the best of my knowledge - I just thought it’s a topic worth mentioning).

[mabedicha]

Thank you all for the great input. The best insights you never want to hear as they usually spoil your idea. I am based in The Netherlands, within 90 minutes reach of 5 airports that do cheap ( 2hour) flights to the Med. I didn't think a lot about maintenance yet but assume will have that done.

[valhalla360]

If you are looking at 2-3 months per year, I would lean against it.

We tried similar and got a boat in Spain with the idea of 3 months on/3 months off. Work got in the way and we wound up 1 month on/1 month off...by the time we got the boat ready to go, it was time to start thinking about putting her to bed.

By the time you add the cost to purchase, maintain and slip the boat, you can probably charter for about the same cost and there are no worries about the boat while you aren't there.

[Palarran]

It would for sure be less expensive and way easier for me to charter a boat for 8 weeks then maintain mine. And that doesn't count anything towards interest on the amount you invested into the boat. So if you buy a $200k boat, either figure it's costing you 3% in interest per year or you could have been making 5% on an investment which would fund part of the charter.

[Xlantic]

I did something similar but only over a three-year period.

I bought my current boat in Croatia and spent the first summer cruising there, wintering in Dubrovnik.

The following summer we went down to the Ionian, cruised there for a couple of months and wintered the boat on the hard in Preveza.

The following Spring I moved the boat to Catania and in the summer cruised Sicily and southern Sardinia before coming to final home port, Menorca.

The good part is we got to cruise distant places breaking-up the long trip over the three years. We could not have done that if we had to come back to the home port at the end of every cruise.

What can be difficult is finding the places to winter, someone to look after the boat and performing the inevitable maintenance work.

Our boat was a bit complicated (wooden, almost 50 years old, recently bought) so this made it harder.

If the boat you buy is easier to look after and winter on the hard it might be OK.

How long do you plan to cruise for in the summers? If it is only 2 or 3 weeks I would recommend chartering. If it is 2 or 3 months then buying is probably a better option.

[mabedicha]

Thanks that is very insightfull. Would you do something different? Our plan is to buy a (hopefully) relatively low maintenance boat (~10 yr old production). I think we would be sailing around 6-8 weeks per year. I have chartered boats before in the med and am considering continuing that but as I would be doing that in the high season (before I was able to do it in low season) it would also be very costly.

[HeinSdL]

I think it's doable but mainly by keeping the boat on the dry when you're not there. That's what I do. Only unknown is are there enough 'dry' storage places in the Med. I imagine there are but usually not in the prettiest places (which is not important anyway).