My wife and I are
boating virgins. We have been building a fairly high pressure career together for the last several years and have started to realize we don't have much of a life outside of
work. As we explore the changes we want to make, our conversations focus around owning something instead of
renting, being close to nature, working with our hands, and inviting friends into our home. Unfortunately, for our career we will need to move to
Hong Kong where a 300 sqft apartment sells for about 1 mil USD. This (especially my desire to have something to constantly fix and tinker with) led us to the idea of
boating through stumbling across SV Delos on youtube.
With that out of the way, I have a ton of questions for this community.
We are too ignorant to know what we want in terms of
boat choice but will only have about 80 hours and $1000 per month budgeted for
maintenance (post refit). We'll live tied up to a
mooring ball in a typhoon shelter and need to commute to shore at least 3 or 4 days a week. We would probably need to make all of our own power and
water.
How practical is this? Can you maintain a decent sized sailboat on that
budget or should we adjust it? How much time does it take to bring a
dinghy 500m to shore and tie it up for the day?
We have taken an interest in an Islander 44 on the cheap end and a Mason 43 or CT-47 on the higher end. What does the community think of these boats? Are they suitable as daysailers that would have to ride out a couple of typhoons (on a
mooring ball in a shelter) each year?
Any thoughts on accommodations? We would be sleeping 2 on weekdays, maybe more on weekends, and needing to seat up to 6 in the
cockpit.
Any thoughts on performance? Will we care about performance if we're only sailing to nearby islands on weekends when the
weather is good?
Can we string up
solar panels all the way down the sides of the
boat or is that going to make problems?
Those of you who have firsthand experience with
electric drives (I've already heard from ppl who have diesels, love them, and will never part with them), do you recommend it for daysailing or not? How powerful is your
motor and what performance do you get in choppy seas? I ask these questions because I can get
solar panels and lithium
batteries for about a tenth what they typically cost;
storage and generation are only limited by space. Also, diesel/gas cost almost $10/gal there.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read through my situation and questions. If you can answer one or more questions, your response is greatly appreciated!
(I realize bunching everything together is not the best way to get a thorough answer to each question. At the moment, though, I'm not even sure if I'm asking the right questions.)