To answer a couple of your questions: as mentioned in previous posts cost of living depends on what your "necessities" consist of as to how much it takes to live on a boat. We can live quite comfortably on $1500 a month (St. John is an expensive island), but there is always the unexpected
repair or expense that comes up that needs to be factored in of course. We are pretty minimalistic when it comes to
buying, eating out and such and this helps keep our costs down.
As far as
hurricane season goes, we stay on our boat year round. When there is a named storm we move our boat over to
Hurricane Hole (part of a National Monument, thus only open to
anchoring during a named storm) which offers pretty good protection from approaching storms. Or if it's just a bit rough in our anchorage we'll move to a different location for a couple of days.
It's not fool proof (nothing is unfortunately) but as hauling out and leaving for half the year isn't an option it works for us. In the future we are looking at going down island through at least part of the hurricane season. Everyone has a different way of handling hurricane season, but this works for us.
For more information, check out my blog at
www.mountainsandseashore.blogspot.com.
Happy sailing and wishing you all the best in your journey!
Camile
s/v Obsession
St. John, USVI