I work in a town on the Westchester, NY coast. My husband just got a job in eastern Long Island. We both want to live in the Stony Brook area (we’re thinking Port Jefferson), on or near Long Island’s north coast, if at all possible. If we moved there, the commute by train or by car would be pretty terrible for me, though. (Neither of us is in a position to quit our jobs right now, so that’s out.)
There’s a ferry from Port Jefferson to Bridgeport, Connecticut, but that would still stick me with a commute of about 3 hours one way, since I’d have a pretty long train ride from Bridgeport to the town where I work. Also, since I work afternoons and evenings, the ferry might not be the best option, since the last ferry is usually at 8:00 pm, a good two hours before I’m sometimes finished working.
In your humble opinions, how miserable would it be to commute by speedboat from Port Jefferson to, say, Mamaroneck, Rye, or Port Chester? I could see it being kind of fun in summer, but I’d have to do it during the winter months, too. What major drawbacks could you see in doing this, other than being really cold in winter? How expensive could this get? Is it much more dangerous than I might realize? Would I have to stay home, due to stormy seas, often in winter? There’s got to be a reason why you don’t see tons of speedboating commuters, and I’d like to know what that reason is.
This question might not make much sense to non-New York Area dopers, and I wanted to post it in a more location-specific board. I couldn’t find another board where I’m likely to find intelligent, relevant replies and insight, though, so I’m posting it here. I’d appreciate any help you could give me with this! Thanks a ton.
It’s about 30 miles from Port Chester to Port Jefferson by sea. Unless you buy a Miami Vice cigarrette boat, you’re looking at a minimum 1 hour trip, in good weather. Don’t even try it in a small boat if the weather’s bad. It’s not just that it’s cold in winter - you’ll be shipping a lot of water in high winds, so you’ll wind up soaked. Plus it’s easy in bad weather to take a wave the wrong way, swamp your boat, and sink. And don’t think about going fast in low visibility or at night -you’ll be a small boat in a waterway that contains a lot of craft much, much larger than you. So you’re talking a few hours to get home every night unless you leave well before sunset.
Add to that the cost of buying and maintaining a speedboat, which are much, much higher than the costs of maintaining a car, and I don’t think this will fly.
My strong suspicion is that it is much more expensive than you think it is. However, I do not own a speedboat and may be wrong.
And perhaps more of a hassle in other ways as well.
The questions you need to resolve first (in my opinion) are where can you park your speedboat while you are at work, how much does it cost to do so, and how difficult is it to get to your workplace from where you park your speedboat.
Do you own a speedboat presently? Because initial purchase is costly as well. And there’s a significant learning curve on the whole docking the boat thing. And Boat Fuel costs a pretty penny.
Are you prepared to change clothes morning and evening? Or is your workplace friendly towards clothing suitable for riding on a speedboat?
I work in Stony Brook. My prior boss commuted from Westchester to Stony Brook every day for 2 years. Another person I worked with had been doing it for about 20 (his family did not want to move to Long Island). So it is definitely do-able. Plus the ferry is pretty expensive and not really a time saver unless there is a lot of traffic in Queens and the Bronx. I read an article a few years ago about people using the ferry to commute from LI to CT, but they kept cars in CT to cut down on the ferry fare, and were also working near the ferry.
I don’t know a thing about boats, and it seems as though there’s plenty of reasons stated above as to why you shouldn’t do it … but if you did do it, it’d be friggin’ awesome!!
Could you possibly telecommute a few days a week? Perhaps you could find a different job closer to home? Commuting by boat will be expensive and often impossible and it would probably be worth taking a $4000 a year pay cut to not have to commute for 6 hours a day or buy a boat.
I once worked with an ex-fighter pilot turned corporate vice-president that commuted from Maine to suburban Boston most days via his own small plane. He had cars at both airports and it worked out ok especially because there are airports very close to each location and it was semi-economical. I heard of another man that did the same in the general D.C. area. Maybe you should look into that. If you are very wealthy, a helicopter may even be better.
I once worked with a guy who commuted by private airplane so you would only have the second most awesome commute I ever heard of.
Actually, I don’t know how else you would commute there. But there are a couple of issues:
cost - assuming your already own a boat, you would need to pay for slip fees on both side of the LI Sound. Not to mention transportation to and from the harbors and fuel costs.
weather - Every time there’s a Nor’easter, are you going to be like “yar! I can’t be comin into work matees! The seas be too angry!”
I’ve owned a boat here on Puget Sound for some 40 years, mainly as a water taxi to get back and forth from a vacation island in the San Juans. Here is my take on your idea.
How far is the water part of the commute? In order to be reasonably safe, and reasonably reliable, particularly during the winter, you would need a good sized solid boat with an enclosed cabin, something like a 26’ ACB, built here in Bellingham. These would run around $120,000 new, and if you’re reall lucky to find one, maybe $60,000 for a good used one. You would probably have two outboards on the stern of 200 - 250 HP each, and would use around 20 gallons of fuel per hour at a cruise of 30 - 35 knots. So you’re getting less than 2 mpg.
Around here gas in the local marinas is going for around 3 to 3.5 bucks per gallon.
I wouldn’t think of doing this with anything much smaller or lighter than a boat this size, and even then there would be days I’m sure you wouldn’t dream of leaving the shore. The problem here is mainly that you want to be able to use this boat reliably on a schedule of 5 days per week, and don’t want to miss many days of work or drown yourself while so doing.
And there will be more than a few days in the winter, and probably other times as well, when you can get out, but won’t want to go much faster than 7 kts because while the boat can stand it, you probably wiouldn’t like being knocked around so much. How long would the comute take then?
I agree with the other posters about most of the other stuff they’ve mentioned.
It would provide some thrills and exitement, for sure.
Imagne that this equals sign = is the river. I lived on the top bank, my college was on the bottom bank, almost exactly opposite. My commute involved going ten miles down the river by a train and a bus, then a ferry, then a bus, then a long walk, and took at least an hour and a half on a good day. The equivalent boat journey from my house to the college would have taken about fifteen minutes including walking to the boat, mooring it and so on.
It still wasn’t possible due to the cost of buying a boat capable of handling a river that’s sometimes too rough for the ferry to cross it (Thames Estuary - and it was great calling in to say I’d be late because the boat couldn’t sail :D), moaring the boat and both sides, and buying the boat. Even if I’d had the money for all that, I’d have had to learn how to use the boat, which wouldn’t have been simple.
All in all, it’s a lovely idea, and I used to look wistfully out across the river, to where I could just about see my college on a clear day and long to be out there on my own boat, but it would never have worked.
Yeah, around here they’re looking at ferry service along the waterfront as part of the municipal transit system, and the consensus seems to be that it’s doable (barely) in the summer and not in the winter because of the extra bother of dealing with the ice, plus the distances mean that it’s not that much faster than land travel, even with the shortcut across Humber Bay.
No, I like the hovercraft idea better. Conceivably you could go door to door in one – though they’re not street legal so you have to go cross country all the way. If you can get to home and office on both sides without using the streets, or encountering any fences…
You’d have to look very closely at how performance would be affected by rough water. And, um, do hovercraft float if there’s a breakdown over water?
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