Jere Lull wrote:


If you drop the opportunity cost (already gone)

Its gone? Not if you can sell the boat and invest the proceeds

and depreciation, your
actual numbers are in better shape.

Yes, ignoring reality makes everything look better.

Or, one can get a boat that is essentially worthless, like Neal.


Lose the dock (and house?) and anchor out

like Neal

and you're down to fuel, insurance and maintenance.

why stop there, Neal wouldn't have insurance


Slow it down a knot or so, and you'll likely boost fuel economy.

Slow your life down to cruising speed and you'll likely live longer,
cheaper.

So Neal is going to outlive us all???

....
Depreciation of the trawler is $8,000 a year.

Opportunity cost(@ 5%) is $10,000 a year.

Think of it this way: It's a bear market and interest rates are low.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world to have sold the
boat last year and bought an investment house or the S&P 500 or GE or
most anything else and lost your money or lost more than your money if
you leveraged things with a mortgage. You've got the opportunity to
go boating. Some folks have the opportunity to find out if their Bear
Stearns stock will look nice on the living room wall. Opportunity
isn't money in the bank. So, credit yourself $18k for staying out of
a loosing market, put the boat on a mooring and drive a little
slower. Shoots, now it's cheap therapy.

-- Tom.

Well, to make you feel a little better, you are double counting the $10k
lost opportunity cost and the $10 k you would have received in interest.
They are the same thing; count only once.

"Tim Shavinsky" wrote in message
...
Cruising is driving me to the poor house.

I typically put on 250 hours a years at 4 gph which puts fuel at about
$6,000.

The dockspace is costing me $5,000 a year.

Maintenance, insurance is $3,000 a year.

Depreciation of the trawler is $8,000 a year.

Opportunity cost(@ 5%) is $10,000 a year.

The thing is costing me $32,000 a year!

If I just took the money I paid for it and invested I could getting
checks for $10,000 a year rather than being 30K+ in the hole each
year. In 3 years I could have 30K in cash by foregoing the boat or be
100K in the hole.

On the horizon I only see higher fuel costs and everything else going
up in cost, the boat plummeting in value and no increased return on my
retirement egg. I love the boat but this is really draining me, I am
seriously considering pulling the plug before things get worse. Does
anyone here have any creative solutions or are we all in the same
mess? I figure I need 25 years of retirement funds and won't make it
with the trawler. Is there an American friendly country with cheap
fuel, good health care and low expenses? Thanks everyone.

Tim Shavinsky

It doesn't cost, it pays! See my erudite comments interspersed within your
text below.


"Tim Shavinsky" wrote in message
...
Cruising is driving me to the poor house.

I typically put on 250 hours a years at 4 gph which puts fuel at about
$6,000.

If you owned a well-found, blue water sailboat with small four-stroke
outboard engine, fuel, even at today's confiscatory prices, for a year's
cruising might cost all of 50 bucks.

The dockspace is costing me $5,000 a year.

Anybody who keeps their boat at a dock paying absurd by-the-foot prices is
an imbecile. Find a place where your can moor your boat and put down your
own mooring. You suddenly have eliminated a major expense and you will not
be storing your yacht among the floating trailer park trash crowd that
snoops and steals anything not welded down.

Maintenance, insurance is $3,000 a year.

Forget the insurance. It is not needed and is a bet against yourself. Think
of it this way. If the insurance company is willing to bet that you will not
have claims exceeding what you have paid them then shouldn't you be willing
to have the same faith in your abilities to avoid claims? Maintenance is
another story. There will always be maintenance but you should be handy
enough to do all the labor yourself so you will only be paying for parts and
materials. This shouldn't amount to a great deal of money and, done right
with quality, will increase the value of your yacht.

Depreciation of the trawler is $8,000 a year.

Stupid to buy any boat that depreciates. The worst thing you can do is
purchase a new boat because you take a huge hit the first five years or so.
Buy used and buy quality. Maintain your boat to Bristol standards and it
will appreciate. Forget about trawlers. They are just slow stinkpots. Get a
sailboat instead.

Opportunity cost(@ 5%) is $10,000 a year.

What the hell is opportunity cost? Are you talking about loan interest. If
so you are again stupid. NEVER buy something unless you can pay cash for it.
Never pay more than you can afford to take a hit on re the interest
investment hit you might take on your assets. Your very first priority
should always be staying financially solvent and having people paying YOU
interest on your investments. Neither a lender nor borrower be . . .

The thing is costing me $32,000 a year!

You and a lot of other stupid, brainwashed Americans are in the same boat.
You never learned how to manage your money. You have fallen prey to the
consume at all cost liberal mindset. You have made yourself a willing slave
to institutions. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

If you were like me you would have bought a quality blue water sailing yacht
like I did way back in 1985. You would have paid cash for it. You would
never have spent one thin dime on dockage, mooring, insurance, yard labor,
etc. Do it right and your boat MAKES you a ton of money. Let's round off the
years I've owned my yacht to an even 20. Then consider the fact that I've
lived aboard for the whole of that period of time and cruised thousands of
miles under sail using almost no fuel. I've bought a couple sets of sails to
replace worn out ones but that cost is negligible - less than two grand.
Then there's bottom paint, etc but that can also be done on the cheap by
careening in an area that has sufficient tides.

So take 20 years times 10,000 for that is the cost in dollars per year it
takes to rent or buy a house and you come up with 200,000. So my fine yacht
has allowed me to invest 200,000 dollars over the years besides being the
ultimate freedom machine. Also, don't buy an automobile, you won't need one
cruising anyway that will save you 100,000 dollars over 20 years. That's
300,000 dollars. Dockage fees save = 100,000. Total of 400,000 Invest that
sum intelligently and over a 20 year period you will be worth over 1.5
million dollars. Simple rules, simple goals and you will be simply rich. Do
a couple cocaine runs to Colombia and some Cuban cigar smuggling and some
Cuban immigrant smuggling and add another million. Suddenly you're worth
about three million dollars. And you're free of any debts and obligations
and taxes and undue government interference.

If I just took the money I paid for it and invested I could getting
checks for $10,000 a year rather than being 30K+ in the hole each
year. In 3 years I could have 30K in cash by foregoing the boat or be
100K in the hole.

You have an inkling of what it takes to be financially responsible. Now,
you've got to act to start the money rolling in instead of going out. But,
you can't be some little wimp who has to have air conditioning, washer
dryers, refrigerator/freezers, cable TV and all that other crap that just
makes you a slave to what you own and keeps you stuck in one place working
for the man and paying taxes out your rear end. Stop being a brainwashed
liberal and stop supporting a liberal government that brainwashes you into
living to pay for a giant bureaucracy. Grow some gonads and simplify and
live the good life. Independent, uncomplicated, healthy, stress free and
pollution free. Lose the diesel mentality because the fumes alone will
slowly kill you even if the cost of it doesn't.


On the horizon I only see higher fuel costs and everything else going
up in cost, the boat plummeting in value and no increased return on my
retirement egg. I love the boat but this is really draining me, I am
seriously considering pulling the plug before things get worse. Does
anyone here have any creative solutions or are we all in the same
mess? I figure I need 25 years of retirement funds and won't make it
with the trawler. Is there an American friendly country with cheap
fuel, good health care and low expenses? Thanks everyone.

Nope. The only real solution is get rid of large fuel hog motors. They will
drive you into the poor house as fuel will be 10-15 dollars a gallon within
the next three or four years. Plan on living like a slave paying 60-70
percent of your wages on big government Democrat welfare plans such as
socialized medicine and increased welfare and all this carbon credit tax
nonsense. Vote for Barack Obama and really become a slave. You think you
have financial problems now just wait until Obama drives the economy into
the crapper so the Great Depression looks like a cake walk. But, if you're
like me it won't bother you one bit. As a matter of fact I have placed
myself in a position to sail away to some place where I can spend all my
millions that are secure in offshore banks without one dime going to big
government give-away programs. You should think about doing the same.


Wilbur Hubbard

Wilbur has about answered most all your questions.

with the trawler. Is there an American friendly country with cheap
fuel, good health care and low expenses? Thanks everyone.

Wilbur missed addressing the question of American-friendly countries.
Take a look at:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/524/glob...rs-and-leaders

You get to take your pick of the remaining America-friendly countries.
The leaders of the pack include such great cruising destinations as:
Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, India ...

Pew's more recent research suggests that America-friendliness is up in
Nigeria and India. And fuel is right cheap in Nigeria. So there you
go!

Cheers

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:16:39 -0700 (PDT), Bil
wrote:

Wilbur has about answered most all your questions.

with the trawler. Is there an American friendly country with cheap
fuel, good health care and low expenses? Thanks everyone.

Wilbur missed addressing the question of American-friendly countries.
Take a look at:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/524/glob...rs-and-leaders

You get to take your pick of the remaining America-friendly countries.
The leaders of the pack include such great cruising destinations as:
Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, India ...

Pew's more recent research suggests that America-friendliness is up in
Nigeria and India. And fuel is right cheap in Nigeria. So there you
go!

Cheers

And so is piracy. It is one of the worst regions for it

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:48:54 -0400, "Wilbur Hubbard"
wrote:

If you owned a well-found, blue water sailboat with small four-stroke
outboard engine

That's an oxymoron. There are *no* well-found blue water sailboats
with outboard engines.

On 25 Jun 2008 09:21:02 -0500, Dave wrote:

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:56:11 -0400, Wayne.B
said:

That's an oxymoron. There are *no* well-found blue water sailboats
with outboard engines.

Neal has a well-known propensity for trying to make a virtue of necessity.

I guess. It is certainly interesting in a weird sort of way watching
him talk to himself in these contrived discussions. Knowing better of
course, I could still not let the "blue water outboard" pass without
comment.

Having a nice little 4 stroke Honda of my own for the dinghy, and a
couple of 6 gallon tanks, I know something of the fuel range of such
animals. Figure about 1 gph if you are lucky, at maybe 6 knots on a
small light sailboat, times 12 gallons for typical tankage, I get a
fuel range of 72 miles. Just the ticket for a nice blue water
crossing to Bermuda, the Exuma Out Islands, the BVI, etc. Let's hope
for favorable winds and lots of time for the crossings.

What nonsense.

Even with proper diesel inboard aux, most of the serious cruising
sailboats that we see are carrying 40 to 60 gallons of extra fuel on
deck. These are boats that actually go someplace of course.

"Wayne.B" wrote

Knowing better of course, I could still not let the "blue water outboard"
pass without comment.


Nor should the idea of a "blue water" Coronado 27 pass without comment,
welcome though the unintended humor may be in these unnerving times.

People have certainly made blue water voyages, even circumnavigations, in
less but my E 32 is twice the boat and I would not consider her a "blue
water cruiser", despite windvane and extended tankage. That doesn't mean I
wouldn't undertake a passage to Bermuda or a transatlantic in the safest
part of the year but I wouldn't push my luck by making a habit of it.

A "blue water" cruiser is one designed, built, and outfitted primarily for
passages and long cruises. More importantly, it is one that actually does
these things.

--
Roger Long

On Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:26:50 -0400, "Roger Long"
wrote:

"Wayne.B" wrote

Knowing better of course, I could still not let the "blue water outboard"
pass without comment.


Nor should the idea of a "blue water" Coronado 27 pass without comment,
welcome though the unintended humor may be in these unnerving times.

People have certainly made blue water voyages, even circumnavigations, in
less but my E 32 is twice the boat and I would not consider her a "blue
water cruiser", despite windvane and extended tankage. That doesn't mean I
wouldn't undertake a passage to Bermuda or a transatlantic in the safest
part of the year but I wouldn't push my luck by making a habit of it.

A "blue water" cruiser is one designed, built, and outfitted primarily for
passages and long cruises. More importantly, it is one that actually does
these things.

Roger,
That definition of a "Blue water Cruiser" is dependent upon an
individual's viewpoint. I have met many boats that would not meet your
criteria including several barebones Wharram cats that I would
consider grossly inadequate for my own needs. However, to their long
time owners and crusiers they are considered ideal for crossing
oceans. Quite a lot of what are advertised in boating magazines as
"blue water cruisers" are not, regardless of their size and how many
people have bought them to go "blue water cruising" Jenneaus, Oceans
and Benetaus are only a few of them. They are certainly not made for
out of sight of land crusing though doubtless some are taken there.

Each owner has a different set of criteria. Your friend Wilbur for
example, extols the virtues of a simple wooden bucket. The texbooks
say that twin or bilge keel boats are not good cruisers. The cruiser
who has one would extol the virtues of shallow draft and being able to
anchor close in and dry out level.

Provided the vessel is sound and seaworthy and the sailor has
knowledge of his boat and its behaviour in all sea conditions, the
main component of a "blue water cruiser" is the sailor him/herself.

Neither Bligh nor Shackleton captained the ideal "blue water cruiser'
though I dare say they would have prefered one such.

Peter