13 years sailing around the world (opens in new tab)

Well known saying: "Cruising is repairing your boat in exotic places." Getting replacement parts in exotic places tends to be expensive and takes a lot of time and energy. The more "modern" your boat is, the more expensive and difficult it is to repair.

As you note, most of the cruising time is spent at anchor. A lot of time spent at anchor is dealing with provisioning because everything takes a dinghy ride (first pump out the water and maybe fix the outboard) and walking to the (small) store to buy from what they have on hand.

Yeah, Delos are pretty open about there being a lot of maintenance, and video editing (~80 hours work total per episode), they just don't show that most of the time because people (like me) want to see the other stuff.

As a boat owner, a lot of this is true. My boat is on the hard right now and the yard will handle some of the stuff that needs fixing, but I'm doing a lot myself for two reasons:

1. It costs me less real money

2. I enjoy it.

I'm a CTO, I spend my life in meetings, spreadsheets, documents, and sometimes a text editor, terminal or database console. On Friday I am heading to the boat with a friend. We will drink some beer, then on Saturday we will break out the spanners and service the seacocks, replace some interior trim we took out last time, fix the cockpit manual bilge pump and a few other things.

Honestly, this is the stuff I've been looking forward to more than anything in the last two weeks since I was last there.

If you want relaxing, charter a boat, pay a skipper, or get a hotel, no judgement :) I've never really been able to relax for more than a few hours without wanting to do something though, and sailing, or the inevitable maintenance, is a really happy thing for me to do.

Of course another advantage of doing this stuff yourself is that you can afford to hang around the Bahamas, or sail around the world, something that you can't do so well if you aren't willing to do maintenance yourself.

I was in Aber until last month! Sailed there from Falmouth, but now in Pwllheli further up the coast.

Losing your rudder would kinda suck.

Ah yeah, I guess I missed Nahoa! They're in my subs list and worth a place on the list.

Nike inspired us to become sailors, infinitely grateful for her work with the channel.

Here are some extra suggestions for anyone interested in the lifestyle:

- Life on a Little Wooden Boat: https://vimeo.com/94842405

- Minimalism in a Tiny Home at Sea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaH_UUH0Ek

- Untie the Lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VERYUyO93_Y

- Gypsea Stories: Wylo II: https://vimeo.com/284310686

- A Rogue Mariner on the upper Thames: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbPgP6wIF44

- Deep Water: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460766/

- Cinq Ans Pour la Banquise: https://youtu.be/QBrvPaNz1Bo

Thanks, will take a look!

Already a sub! Just didn't add to the list, it was already pretty long for a "get started here" list!.

Was 39 or so when I left. I still did remote consulting work from the boat the first year while doing the refit, but it meant the refit was going too slow :) No job since, see other comment about money.

Bought boat in UK, sailed across the English channel a few times and then down Biscay, Galicia & the Rias, Portugal, up the Rio Guadiana (amazing), through Gibraltar, Costa del Sol (yuck), Baleares, Sardinia, Sicily, Greece, then Sicily and Greece again (because Greece is great and also because Covid). Couple other trips on friendboats.

Atlantic crossing E-W with the trades is no big deal, but going the other way (Americas to Europe) can be scary and is not for inexperienced sailors.

If the Med is your dream, might be best to buy a boat here instead. Boats that are great at ocean crossings aren't best at Med sailing and vice versa.

Plenty of ways. In the past being a good mechanic was handy. Today being an engineer is highly valuable:

Electrical: 110v 60 Hz, 220v 50 Hz and 12v for 12v DC for electronics while you run 24v dc for the rest. Networking radars, GPS, AIS, plotters has become incredibly complex.

Sewing: having a commercial sewing machine has proven to be useful (to make friends). Repair sails, awning, various canvas

Digital media: most popular boats have satellite com on board and produce one quality youtube video every week. Photos, blogs, manage fans on Instagram. You were hoping to get away from the hustle? You will be back in it quickly.

Refrigeration skills: get yourself a set of gauges ($50), vacuum pump, several cans of refrigerant, soldering equipment. Whomever can produce cold (freezer, cold beers or ice cubes) is king in the tropics.

I can add to this list. The world of handymen is incredibly unskilled. Come with a mechanical engineering or EE/CS background, you will be making friends faster than you can think.

Mostly savings, small rental income to supplement, some stock trading. The trick is to reduce spending, mostly by not buying too big a boat.

People have ideas about remote work on board, but for various reasons this rarely works out in practice. Internet connectivity is poor and intermittent, your schedule is ruled by the weather and having to work seriously distracts from the fulltime job that cruising is by itself.

By getting a boat. Getting on someone else's boat is good too, as you can get experience and learn from them. Sailing is easy - you don't need to win races when cruising around the world, so the finer details of trimming will be wasted on cruisers (you can always pick them up on the way). Navigation and traffic rules shouldn't be hard to pick up for the average HN crowd, although yachties like to make a fuss about it.

I did a few RYA training things that cost a lot of money and got me some papers that nobody ever wanted to see (they're important if you want to charter a boat though). You can just buy the syllabus and gain the knowledge by online learning or video courses instead. I recommend going that route - the knowledge in the syllabus is important and very useful. The formal course in a classroom and the certificate are not. Practical knowledge is gained only by going sailing, making mistakes and learning from them, but it helps if you know the knots and the parts of the rigging beforehand.

But the real learning only begins when you get your own boat and have to fit it out and keep it going. Boat maintenance is hard and there's a lot to learn. You can initially substitute money, but that stops working once you get to remote areas where there is simply nobody else to pay to fix your boat and you will have to do it yourself or give up. Many decrepit boats in remote locations are on the market very cheaply for exactly that reason.

You might be able to find a sailing co-op in your area. I'm a member of one that requires 30 hours of volunteer work, which you can gain experience in a wide variety of things - fibreglassing, painting, plumbing, electrical, rigging, etc.

We've got a fleet of 6 27' - 30' boats which are great for day sailing and week long vacations.

How I started, YMMV:

1. Watching a lot of YouTube, see my list of channels in another comment, and the note about not believing everythin they do is correct.

2. Joining the local dinghy sailing club. It's cheap, and although I don't really care about racing the skills were mostly directly transferrable to larger boats. Plust contacts are really useful.

3. Get on other people's boats as crew. I own a 43ft yacht, my friend sails it with me. It costs him nothing :)

Later, when you have tried it out and got some experience, take your Day Skipper (RYA) or equivalent course (the ASA in the US runs some). You should at this point have a reasonably good idea of your skills.

At some point in the process, start looking at yacht listings. Yacht World would be a good start. Get an idea of the market. You will work out how much you need to save, and what sort of prices are reaonable.

get classes, pretty unexpensive. After your first 5-7 days when you learn basic skills you will receive plenty of invitations to crew. Not unlike the corporate world, too many chiefs, not enough workers. Good crews are in high demand (and you can bring significant other, friends). Lots of owners are clueless. Lots of big boats are looking for crews, typically an ocean crossing. Think Panama-Tahiti. Expenses, including flights, paid

SV Delos put a (large-ish: 50kg) satellite dish from Viasat on their boat a while ago:

* https://svdelos.com/sailing-videos/how-to-get-super-fast-int...

Not cheap, but it seems you can get roughly DSL-equivalent speeds.

I heard that right now you have to pick a spot, but the rumour is that in the future you will be able to move around. I don't have much more than that, Musk may have tweeted about it at some point.

Only for now. They wouldn't be sending out surveys about RV usage [0] if that is going to be permanently the case.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/prgrbb/starlink_r...

The current production ones yes but they got some models working on air force planes 2 years ago [0] so they can probably handle a boat. Probably won't be cheap though.

[0]: https://www.investors.com/news/spacex-starlink-impressed-air...

Aren't some toponyms different from language to language though? What English speakers know as "Japan" is "Nihon" in Japanese.

That's not the problem

> I.e. the the difference between a 31' and 45' will not make one bit of difference to the sea, however the 31' will be like 4-8x cheaper to supply.

Not wrong from a financial point of view, but the it should be noted that (generally speaking) a boat's maximum speed is proportional to its length:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_speed

You can cross oceans in a small boat, but you will probably do it much slower than a longer boat. There is some probability that something will go wrong every day you're out on the water, so the longer it takes the higher the chances that something bad will happen (never mind all the extra provisioning needed for those days). Also, the longer you're out, the more likely the weather will shift to something you won't like and you won't be able to avoid it because of your slow(er) speed.

Just another factor to consider.

If I was going alone I would definitely seek a smaller boat, I spent quite a bit of time on a Moody 34 as a kid and that would make a great liveaboard for a single person or a couple I think. I'm going to be living with friends from my old uni's sailing club so the extra space might justify the extra cost, although as you say the tradeoff between space and safety is a vital one and it won't be a decision taken lightly. Serious ocean crossings won't be on the table initially too which will help, we'll mainly be sticking to our native Britain at first and then venturing into longer passages once we're confident in the boat. Obviously it'll depend on what's on the market when I'm ready to buy too, but I'm in no hurry and can wait for the right one to come along.

I disagree. The difference between 31’ and 45’ is huge. 45’ will give you a much more comfortable ride and is safer in rough weather. Of course with both you want a blue ocean capable sailboat and not a coastal cruiser.

A good directional aerial and a 4G/5G modem at first which will be a big limiting factor on where we can travel but eventually we'll go for Starlink or another satellite internet provider when they're no longer geofenced. I believe that there are plans for Starlink to support mobile installations in the next few years and honestly in a fair few places I've lived in recent years the 4G has been faster and more reliable than the ADSL or even FTTC connection anyway.

The long passages are only a part of the appeal too, a large motivation is being able to explore coastal places on land without the issue holidaying has of trying to cram in as much as possible before you go to back to work. Also being able to opt-out of the miserable grey British winter is a part of it too, even three months on a mooring bouy somewhere with longer days would make it worthwhile!

Inmarsat have full global coverage on L-band (except in Antarctica and the North Pole). KA-band is still a bit difficult and expensive on a small vessel as it’s currently dependent on very expensive steerable antennas. There’s also Iridium.

The understatement of the universe.

Plastic (fiberglass) boats can “last” (continue floating, at least) a very long time. But they can go from well-maintained and usable to immobile and dangerous in months without attention.

Source: owner of a 45-year-old, well-maintained sailboat (not my first).

My operating costs for a 38' are around $10-15k annually, including a slip at a (low-cost) marina and maintenance, but doing most maintenance myself. The first year had at least $10k more in "catch-up" maintenance items. I do pay others to periodically haul the boat, repaint the hull, check zincs, etc.

It would be considerably higher paying shop rates for most maintenance, or if you had expensive tastes in sails or electronics.

For me this works out to about 15-20% of the cost per boat in ongoing annual opex cost. Kind of like a software maintenance contract!

Ongoing maintenance includes stuff like:

* Engine maintenance: oil, fuel filters, oil filters, impeller, occasional corrosion repainting, occasional replacement of wear parts (belts, exhaust elbow, flex piping)

* Fixing leaks from things like deck prisms, portholes, deck, chainplates. Usually involves epoxy, sealant, disassembly of components

* Care of interior and exterior wood - varnish, or oiling, or other protection as preferred

* Regular lubrication of moving parts, such as the helm and steering assembly

* Replacement of running rigging (ropes that control sails) when it gets tired

* Checking standing rigging (steel cables that keep the mast up), replacing when needed, though these last a long time. This usually needs professional riggers and is more expensive.

* Keeping corrosion under control - stainless is never as stainless as you want

* Replacing sails every 10-15 years, assuming you are ok with more tired sails toward the end

* Having diver clean hull, also repainting hull every 2 years, replacing zincs as needed, usually 1-2x annually depending on water type

And other stuff. Replacing marine toilet pumps, fixing shower sumps, replacing bilge pumps, fresh water pumps, etc.

These things aren't as bad as they sound if you like working with your hands and have time. I like it because my day job limits the use of my hands to the keyboard. And you don't need to know how to do all this stuff - I learned almost all of it while attempting to do it, and I still learn all the time. But if hands-on work isn't your cup of tea, it will get very expensive.

The reward, beyond the fun of doing the work, is sitting on the deck, anchored at a remote island looking at incredible sunsets in the summer. Or being the only boat out on a winter day and seeing a humpback whale surface near your boat, hang around for a while. Or sitting down below next to a warm fireplace in the winter with a good book listening to the patter of rain. Sleeping on a comfortable bed in absolute silence in remote areas, far away from any cars, sirens, or other people. Trimming the sails and feeling the power of the wind energize the boat, pulling it forward as your boat nearly silently cuts through the water.

For me, totally worth it, but it does become a fairly important part of your life.

My operating costs are about the same as my marine mortgage payments.

There’s always https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sven_Yrvind

He's kind of a legend, and seems to give interviews to anyone who runs into him. Here's a pretty good recent one and a tour of his boat:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bca5_uyH9E4

His actual videos might be more interesting to someone with an interest in (unconventional) boat building.

He does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sven_Yrvind

Some people don't have the travel bug. My dad sees the world as just going to work and making money and that's all he cares about.

In the words of the late Dr. Johnson, "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned".

Does it really work with multiple kids? I live with multiple kids in a somewhat spacious (for a city!) apartment, and man, it drives me and the spouse crazy when the kids are staying indoors for the entire day, not to mention multiple days on end, for whatever reason (terrible weather, covid quarantines, etc.). I just can't imagine what it would be like doing an ocean passage with them on a boat.

(I spent a lot of my holidays as a kid sailing with my parents, but that was maybe a bit different as I was the only kid)

It really is, lots of families do it, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/c/SailingZatara and more recently: https://www.youtube.com/c/SailingLaVagabonde

Perfect, thank you

Thank you for the great advice, I will try to team up, I can defiantly be useful on the boat. I know how to sail, but not on the wind. :) So I need to learn a lot.

there was no post before that since may, just nothing to write about.

last blog entry mentions deck repairs which can't be done during rain season. so it appears they are stranded until then.

the boat-sale was posted on 30-Aug-2016, but updated later (mentions 2018 engine replacement which also correlates to a blog entry: http://blog.mailasail.com/wildfox/posts/2018/9/20/496-a-new-...)

so yeah, i am sure that's the boat. i guess they are just living on it until they find a buyer.

Among many issues, until they can figure out inter-satellite links, service far from a coast will be no bueno.