I have questions....

[JPA Cate]

One way to keep costs down is to buy a trailer sailer and teach yourselves to sail, and use it for weekends and for overnighters, and see if you even enjoy sailing.

Do you have enough money? who knows? boats are demanding of upkeep on a regular basis, and insurance: those costs never seem to go down. If you would be satisfied with an old, old clean, solid boat, a monohull, cozy, not airily spacious, it will cost less. Once you start talking 35-40 foot cats, you're talking worn out and shabby or expensive. Due to their popularity, cats command impressive prices, and attract fleets of inexperienced sailors, too.

Learn to sail and go cruising locally in the oldest, smallest good solid mono you can find. If you sail a lot in all kinds of weather, rather than cherry picking only easy weather, you will learn a lot of the sea and its moods, and the weather gods mischievous natures. By the time the family goes out and rounds Vancouver Is. and returns home, if they still like it, it's time for fine tuning and orchestrating departure.

This all would probably take you three years or so. Learn the Colregs. Experience maintaining a sailboat on your own. See what you spend. Ultimately that will tell you the dollars and (beware the pun) sense (cents). If you are careful to keep your wife having fun (this means frequent checking with her, and not "hogging" all the good bits), she will likely go along for the long haul. It usually also means, don't take her out and make her cold wet and terrified, which CAN happen if you are having fun in the same conditions. Many women quickly tire of cold, wet and terrified, and may become angry at that point about having to caretake all the others, more or less singlehanded. [Friends who bought a boat in Europe and sailed it back to Oz, hired a nanny for both major legs of the journey: Europe to Caribbean and Panama to Oz. So they could enjoy the watches.]

Most beginners underestimate what a lot there is to cruising full time; they get erroneous impressions from You Tube that it is almost effortless; and from what people who enjoy it write about, who mostly do not write about what went wrong, or how that affected them, in the long run. The fact is that a life on the water has potential benefits, but at the same time, water is not our natural environment, as land is. Even in warm tropical waters, we do not survive lengthy immersion.

Ann

[grantmc]

As so often is the case, Ann makes some wonderful suggestions. And I would encourage too, learn, and gain experience. Buy a cheap little keeler (under 10K), get the feel of regular mooring fees, and maintenance along with the maintenance costs. Find out if you all like sailing and living in close proximity together. It's fun to antifoul a 25 foot keeler, I can never do it for under $1,000 with lifts etc but I can get it done in a weekend usually. But a big boat takes an awful lot of sand paper and paint.

The Youtube phenomena has created a very distorted idea of what sailing and maintaining a yacht involves, particularly a large cat.

I would never consider selling a significant asset like your house, to buy a boat, is a good idea. You're swapping something tangible, with income potential, for a liability. A boat can be sunk in an instant, and insurance companies often aren't your best friends when bad things happen. In fact there will be many exclusions based on sailing experience, locality etc. A house at least can provide a rental income.

Something else, is the cabin thing. Just asking whether kids need their own cabin, suggests very limited knowledge about boats. Boats aren't houses on the water (usually). But they're your kids and only you and their mother know and understand their needs. No one on this forum can comment on their needs as individuals.

And things also go wrong, the covid thing is a toxic example of an unplanned event. Where I am in the world there are literally hundreds of boats, either berthed or beached, their owners unable to get to them, paying giant sums of money for their storage. For a decent sized cat that's about 2k per month, plus any extra charges the marinas can conjure up. And if the owner doesn't like that arrangement well take the boat somewhere else. Oh that's right they can't as they're not able to get in the country. Well pay, pay, pay!

But these situations have always been with us, someone at home dies, the boat has a serious issue or accident, there's a serious health issue. So when considering going to Ireland or Greenland or Europe (Ireland is in Europe by the way, as is Iceland) or really anywhere, thousands of kilometres away from home base. How would you feel having to leave your boat for a few months or more?

I don't mean to sound negative, and the above narrative does. Sailing is great fun and travelling to exotic places is amazing and rewarding. It's fantastic for kids too, I guess, although I've not any personal experence sailing with children. But for me, I can relax and enjoy it, I think, a little more because I still have a small income from rent and investments. But more importantly I could cope financially with loosing my boat, and I see people doing that on a relatively regular basis.