Just had a look at used sailing boats in Norway and there are a fair number for under $10 000. Basically cheaper than a used car or camper. I’d have one if I had somewhere to keep it.
My family had a boat quite a few years back. Not a massive one, probably cost ten grand or something. People don’t need to be absolutely loaded to own a boat.
The crab people.
Them Bucklanders, obviously.
No one, take them, they’re free.
Some people would be so relieved.
Boat = a hole in the water that you throw money into.
maybe that should be an addendum or footnote to the “best days of a boat owner’s life”
If you really think about it, no human was ever meant to go on a boat for they are not designed around humans. I think they’re for the illuminati lizards.
I’ve had this awesome teacher. He was a boating and train nerd and looked the part.
Some people don’t even really sail them but live in them.
Boats aren’t even that expensive everywhere. In America they’re priced as luxury objects for the richest of the rich from what I’ve heard. Sailing as a way of traveling is actually a kinda cheap and rough activity, like camper vans. Not very “rich” stuff at all. My grandparents had a 30 footer and it wasn’t exactly luxurious, definitely camper van vibes. They’d sailed it all over around Europe though.
My dad got a relatively seaworthy one for around £5000. It’s the maintenance and marina fees that cost.
Yeah, everyone’s got a camper van everywhere because of how cheap they are
Camper vans, mobile homes, small sailboats, all wall street rich guy shit, right? Even a CEO is lucky to afford a used camper van.
Actually not everyone has a camper van everywhere because not everyone desires or has the use for a camper van.
A new camper van in the US can easily cost 6 figures.
And a used one can easily be had for less than 15,000
I can’t even get a used car with less than 100,000 miles for less than $15,000.
Uhh you’re not looking hard enough. Hell there are pickup trucks for less than 15k with less than 100k miles.
Where I live used pickups are the worst, costing almost as much as buying new.
Yea that seems to have calmed down a bit recently though.
They’re not that expensive, at least not up-front. A guy I know bought a sailboat for a few thousand dollars, but the catch was that it was almost 50 years old and needed a lot of repairs. He saved money by doing the repairs himself, but the $400 per month slip fee was still too much for him eventually and he sold the boat.
I picked up a fifty year old English built sailboat (Westerly Centaur) for all of $500. My local yacht club (more a working man’s boat club than the posh social group that the name suggests). Prior owner fell up on hard times in the middle of a refit and stopped paying storage fees. I picked her up from the club after they placed a lien on it. Since the club is full of powerboat owners, none of them were interested in buying a sailboat.
I’m working to finish the refit, doing the majority of the work myself. Helps that the club fees about to about $1100 a year. $400 a month would be excessive if I weren’t living on the boat full time… And refitting a boat while living on her sounds like a miserable experience.
As a marine engineer who worked and both new build and refit side of the business, I’d say whatever price you pay for the boat itself, be prepared to pay same amount in 5 years for maintenance and marina fees etc.
My friend bought a single mast boat for £50 off a guy at his local. The dude had bought another bigger boat and just wanted away with the smaller one.
You got the right idea I think. The boats are all smooshed together in a Marina so it’s natural for people to overestimate the number of boats relative to the number of people. There are way way way more people then there are boats. Honestly that’s the appeal of boats, the ability to go somewhere there aren’t a lot of people because most people don’t own boats.
For similar reasons, I would like to build a house in the form of a 300’ tall wizard tower in a random suburban neighborhood. But those bastards down at the planning division won’t approve my plans!
There’s a tower house out where I used to work. Built in the 70s I think by a Microsoft exec.
Only about 100’ tall though I believe.
It apparently is an airbnb now: the “Union Skyhouse”.
Socialism is when the planning department won’t approve your 300’ wizard tower on a quarter acre lot. Save us, von Mises!
Dude, you want to get together? I’ve been planning my wizard tower for years. All I want is a parapet around the top with a telescope out there. The best part is that finding an area with low/no light pollution means there won’t be dang pesky jerks that want to keep a certain look to the neighborhood.
Burn all the grass around the tower, and have bands of roving dogs running wild around it.
A city of 250,000 people could have 250 boats (that’s enough for a marina or two) and it would be 0.01% of the population (the one percent of the one percent). That seems to not really be that crazy.
And if you consider that a small percentage of the boat population may have 2 or even 3 boats, than it gets even less weird.
I also think that if you live near water, people are generally at least a little more likely to get a boat instead of a nice car or bigger house or other luxury item.
Edit: I was off by an order of magnitude so it would be 0.1% not 0.01, however, I think the broader point is still valid.
You’re also forgetting all the people who live on a boat instead of buying or renting property. I live in a coastal state, and some marinas work like trailer parks, where you pay the moorage fee and they supply water/sewer/electric to your boat.
What about fibre link?
I don’t know of any nearby marinas that offer internet connection. You’re pretty much stuck with satellite if you want reliable internet on a boat.
Crap, I was planning on confusing the geolocation algorithms by moving my server around.
Guess I’ll have to figure something else out.
But 0.01% of 250,000 is 25.
(Sorry 🙁)
Yea that’s my mistake, but even scaled up an order of magnitude I think it still works. That’s still 1 in 10 one percenters.
boats aren’t expensive, especially the older they are. fixing boats properly is expensive, but you also don’t really need to do that. My dad had a racing boat when I was a kid, it cost him $400… I bought a dinghy last year for $200. That’s less than the cost of a game console. And it costs literally nothing to go take it out on the water.
fixing boats properly is expensive, but you also don’t really need to do that
Yeah, this sounds like really bad advice…
And it costs literally nothing to go take it out on the water.
You sound like a boat salesperson.
They did say a dinghy so that would be accurate. Anything you can carry is going to be very cheap. Anything you can’t will cost a lot more. Think my kayak was a bit over £1000. Costs nothing to use it. But currently can’t store it at my new house and ideally want to change that at some point. It won’t fit through the gate very easily and I think its a bit heavy to carry on my own.
My mom grew up in the '40s and '50s and she told me many times about the surplus PT boat her dad had bought at the end of WWII which the family would take out for boating trips. I was like holy shit a PT (Patrol Torpedo) boat! These things had three Packard engines and could make 45 knots. Later on as an adult I discovered that it was actually just a pontoon boat, one of the things the army would use to make temporary bridges over rivers and that could only go about 3 mph. My mom had just thought “PT” stood for “Pon Toon” so that’s what she called it. It turns out she had always wondered what the hell John F. Kennedy had been doing in the Pacific fighting the Japanese in a pontoon boat.
Later on, I then learned that my mom’s uncle had actually bought a surplus Air/Sea Rescue boat after the war. This boat was basically a PT boat, just with two of the Packard engines instead of three; since it was 15 feet longer than a PT boat it could also do 45 knots. So it turns out my mom did have this childhood experience of rocketing around the ocean at unbelievable speeds. Her uncle ended up selling the boat after the engine room caught fire for the third time (something these engines were notorious for) and we have no idea what happened to it after that. These boats cost about $190K new and he had somehow acquired it for $10K - I expect there was some shady dealing going on there.
Nice read
Ah you are on to John Boatman I see…
It’s like when you drive through an area that’s all McMansions you’re like “how they hell are there this many people with enough money and poor enough taste to own all these McMansions”? I guess the thing is that money people property sprawls out, whereas most of us live in a container city down a hole clustered around a sewer outlet so thousands don’t take up that much space.
I have the same experience driving around the Philly suburbs (mostly west and southwest of the city proper). Like, what the fuck do all these people do that they can afford these places?
middle management or sales
There are a lot of people in the world. Like a loooooot. Even if the % of non normies is only like 0.01% of the population that would easily explain those boats.
This is the real answer and the reason online bubbles are so sad.
There’s so many different way to live your life and we are atrofied around a couple of equally bad options.
If there was a plague that had a 100% human infection rate and killed 87% of the people infected it would still only set back world populations to around the start of the 1900s
True. The start of the 1900s was no time for messin’ around and making babies. We had to go work in the mines
But the children yearn for the mines
Same people who own all the empty properties, residential and commercial; Fucking leaches, that’s who.
Eh, as someone who knows a boat person its like only half that, the other half really, really like boats.
You’re talking boat-people. The topic is Dock Queens; The vast majority of the boats in most marinas, which never leave the dock.
I’m a boat lover and a (thankfully)former landlord. I seent it.
