Greetings! I'm very much a baby beginner in the world of boats, but I'm excited about
learning.
I stumbled into this fascinating field because my
family (husband, brother and myself) began recently looking seriously into what we're going to do with our lives when our
kids are out of the nest, which will happen in three years or so. My husband's job is
remote and therefore portable; I do
work that I can find anywhere I go. So we have a pretty wide range.
We had originally intended to live full time in the
Netherlands, where we have close friends. Somebody suggested we start looking at houseboats or floating homes, which are popular there, and so we did, and fell in love with the idea of living on the
water. After a little while, my husband mentioned that while he's happy to spend a lot of time in the
Netherlands he'd prefer to bounce around some -- a few months there, a few months in the
Caribbean, a few in the northeastern United States, etc -- and so we began to consider boats that actually MOVE, so that we can take our home with us when we travel.**
We're all senior citizens or nearly so (my husband and I are in our fifties, my brother in his seventies), so we're not looking for anything too strenuous to
work with. We'll stick to
power boats rather than sailing vessels, I think. The two biggest challenges we face are needing a
boat built for accessibility (at the moment, we can all walk; we cannot assume that will be true for the duration of our life on board) and having too many people! In addition to the three of us who will be living there, we've got three young adult
children who may be visiting at any time, possibly with partners, and so we're going to need something that will fit a bunch of us in a pinch.
I would love anything you can suggest in terms of resources for
learning about the
liveaboard life and what I'll need to know in order to evaluate, buy, and then run/live in our
boat when we get it! I'm a sponge soaking up information for the moment. We know we don't want a pure floating house; were looking at the range from houseboats to Dutch barges to the lower end
motor yachts. Because of the accessibility issues, we may need to get our own built or refurbished for us from the
hull up... I've never seen an accessible boat in any of those categories before.
In any case, I'm very happy to be here! I can't wait to learn from you all.
(**I'm not stupid enough to try and pilot *anything* across the Atlantic myself, even if we get one which is made for those distances; whatever we get, if we bring it back and forth with us across oceans we will either hire crew to sail it there or get it shipped if it's not made for
blue water on its own. So please don't be alarmed that I talk about locations on opposite sides of an ocean in the same breath that I'm talking about being a
novice and looking at houseboats and Dutch barges... I do know better to think that either of those, or I myself for that matter, have any business out in the middle of the Atlantic on our own.)
Re: Bewildered newbie
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