“Intro”

Why A Boat

It started mainly as a housing hack to maintain startup runway, and act as a nest egg if things didn’t work. For years I wanted to prove that it was a viable option for low income people due to advances in food, material, and energy technologies. After all these years, I can definitively say it’s not a smart option. Simply too much time needs to be invested to make it work. Financially it’s allowed for a low burn rate and a great sense of security, but I’ve wasted years of my life stressing and learning about a subject that never feels finished. My time and money would have been better spent compounding on other things.

Having said all that, being a boat owner has captured my heart and imagination in a way almost nothing else in my life ever has. I’ve gained more confidence and purpose than joining the Peace Corps, any job, or whatever other mid life crisis I’ve cooked up. The days are long, everything does go wrong constantly and cost too much, but I go to bed in beautiful places with amazing community. Or I go to bed throwing up from sea sickness and nervous something will happen while Korinne is on night watch. But that’s part of it all as well.

A Word On Boat Projects

To own a boat, you must be an amateur mechanic, wood worker, electrician, seamster, plumber, painter, climber, metal worker, diver and sailor to a respectable degree. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few I’ve not needed to learn yet. The point is, when you think through it, that’s kind of a lot of things to get good at. And often you can’t ease into them. Everything will eventually break on a boat — no matter how good or minimal it is. I used to not know my way around a hardware store. Now I know most of the sections pretty well.

Now that I’ve tried to scare you, everything is pretty easy to learn with a few attempts and lots of research. Boat projects have been remarkably similar to coding projects in how to estimate them in complexity, time, and to a much lesser extent — cost. Something I’ve learned in my programming career, is to estimate project cost and time not based on how long I think each section will take, but on how long it took me to accomplish similar difficulty projects. And then after that, I triple the estimate thinking it will never take that long. Most of the time it does.

If you want to know how much this endeavor will cost you in money or time look at my notes, but more importantly go watch the youtubers who actually build. Even non extensive refits take years by a couple working full time who are incredibly talented. Took the incredibly talented builders of our boat decades of working on it and I’m nearly certain they thought it would just be a 7 - 10 year project. If you want to get out sailing as fast as possible, buy an old boat which has done serious cruising recently. Even a new boat will simply take a year to get things working correctly. Of course finding one of these boats at the cost and location you want is difficult, so you’ll have to compromise somewhere. In this section you can see how my compromises worked out.