Making the Most of a Minimal Budget. Contact me at: skintsailor@yahoo.co.uk or on Twitter: @skintsailor

Wednesday 20 July 2016

Living with a Sailing Boat

Out of curiosity I've had a look back through the blog to see when I last had a decent day's sailing.

It was September. It's no wonder I'll have to re-learn how to sail, it's been so long.

If we're really lucky and have a very good year, the weather will be good enough to sail from April to September. More often than not the sailing season gets cut short or interrupted in between.

The assumption is in a good year I'll get at most 5 months sailing in. With four weekends per month, that's 20 sailing sessions. (I can do maths!). At most. Per Year. Chuck in the tides being wrong, or the weather not playing ball, it's a lot less.

With low overheads like I've got, it's quite easy to spread the cost over the year, but even if I calculated it just on a 5-month sailing season, I'm not paying much more than £100 per sailing month to sail the boat. Which in the great scheme of things is still reasonable. Of course spread it over the year then things get better at around £40-£50 per month.

But when you look at the thousands or tens of thousands of pounds that people pay to lay up boats in marinas for most of the year, pay for servicing, maintenance, etc.

They must be really, really keen on sailing to justify the expense. :-)


2 comments:

  1. It always baffles me. Plenty of boats here that go in and out of the water every year then rarely go anywhere.
    We got Frejya for the price of a bicycle, the mooring is virtually free and we go out most weeks. Including Christmas Day

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  2. There are a few like that in the local harbours and Marinas. They come out every winter, get cleaned and anti-fouled every year just to get put back in and sit by the pontoon for the rest of the year. By boat costs effectively pocket money, money I can afford. If the people with the floating status symbols are spending pocket money on their boats, I'd love their salary!

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