The NYTimes had a lovely image in an article today: owning a sailboat is commonly described as “standing in a shower and ripping up hundred-dollar bills.”
What sort of costs are really involved with owning a (small, say) sailboat? A paint job every once in a while, a berth, insurance… it doesn’t sound that bad. And is a sailboat more or less a ‘money pit’ than a motorboat?
The frase I heard was: (loosely translated from Dutch)
‘A hole in the water you throw your money into.’
Well, the sea (and the outdoors in general) is a pretty corrosive environment. It’s not a paint job every once in a while, but pretty often. I helped a friend take his boat out of winter storage one year – the tung-oiled woodwork had to be completely scrubbed and re-oiled. If you use polyurethane of varnish instead, you still have to strip it and redo it every few years. Then there’s wear and tear on lines and sails, mechanical wear on pulleys, winders, and the like.
And, as Dave Barry says, everything you buy has to be “Marine Qualified”, which I assume means galvanized, stainless, or coated, and is much more expensive than ordinary stuff. Barry claims , moreover, that it starts to decay as soon as you pay for it.
The berth and insurance alone can suck up tens of thousands a year. Then there’s maintenance; think of all the work you have to do on a house, and then imagine that it’s rocking back and forth on its foundations all the time. Of course, in a marine environment, everything that can corrodes (along with some things that are advertised not to do so), which, along with the constant vibration, plays havoc with moving parts. And like owning a BMW M-car, everything seems to cost about three times what it ought.
I’d say that sailboats cost more to own and maintain than powerboats of comperable size. A powerboat is basically a hull, a motor or two and a rudder; maybe a bow thruster on a larger boat, plus some fairly pricy electronics for an off-short boat, and charts you need to update every few years. A sailboat has all kinds of tackle, rigging, lines, sails, jib extensions, et cetera. Added to that is that sailboats are almost strictly luxury items; there’s little practical use for sailcraft, and they don’t share components with working boats, so manufacturers can charge high prices for equipment. And sailing is hard work, unless you sail competatively, it’s most likely a hobby that comes with a declining interest as other pressures in life take predence.
The biggest cost of owning a large boat (larger than you can trailer behind a standard 3/4 pickup) isn’t monetary, but the time required. It’s like having a small, retarded child that needs constant supervision and care, lest it get tangled up or make a mess of itself. And it’s a piss-poor investment; notice how whenever you drive past a marina there is a lot full of dry-kept boats with tarps over them, rusting away. They’re not worth sailing (to their owners) and not worth selling. A sailing yacht owner I used to know said that there are two happiest days in a boat-owners life: the day he buys a boat, and the day he sells it.
All that being said, I don’t think that boating is more expensive or time-consuming than many other hobbies like restoring cars, playing golf, collecting first editions, or speculating in the stock market. It’s just that the fiscal payback of it is minimal and most people grow weary of fighting the sea, especially for the amount of effort it takes to get a boat out on the water.
Stranger
Boats do need a lot of upkeep. You pretty much have to keep a sailboat in the water, which means dock fees, etc. They also need regular upkeep; hull cleaning and painting, winch maintenance, rope repair and replacement, and so forth. That quickly adds up.
Sailboats are also subject to lots of stress. Forces that can move a sailboat through the water at 15 knots are putting tons of pressure on the mast, boom, stays, etc. Hard seas carry away stanchions or jam rudders; freak winds damage booms. The auxiliary engine and bilge pumps need constant maintenance. In short, if you actually sail the thing, you rack up even more costs.
Then, like every other hobby there are always temptations, like a second set of winches for racing, and so forth.
Not that power boats are that much cheaper! You don’t necessarily have to keep your ski boat in the water, but you spend tons of money on gas while hauling it to the lake, after which you spend more money filling it with gas. You have to keep it maintained, too. The temptations for pimping your powerboat are just as bad, too.
In boating, it’s not the “paint job every once in a while, a berth, insurance” and other expected things (including, significantly fuel and winter storage), but the unplanned repairs and maintenance that makes it such a financially intriguing hobby.
The marine (particularly saltwater) environment is incredibly harsh. Things rust, chafe, wear out and break all the time. Repair and replacement is more expensive than similar land-based items for a variety of reasons, including the need for special materials (stainless v. ordinary steel), miniaturization, installation in tight spaces, non-household voltages, specialized parts and the cost of trained dockyard workers.
In addition, many people lavish money on their boats to a greater extent than their homes or their cars, particularly when you consider the amount of use they typically get.
That’s perfect (I may steal it).
The one thing that you are neglecting is the unbelievable amount of fuel that a powerboat will consume. I had no idea. A friend of mine bought a 36 foot cabin cruiser. Not a huge boat, but I could easily live on it. It gets about 3/4 mile per gallon. On the other hand, you can get to Santa Cruz Island in 45 minutes.
My Hobie Cat costs me about $500 a year, except for the occasional catastrophe. I hope to own a 30 foot Catalina some day, the Volkswagen of sailboats. And it’s true, every friggen little nut, bolt or shackle costs 10 times as much as you think it would.
There are sailboats that are cheap: a sunfish, for instance, requires very little in the way of upkeep – it’s all fiberglass and chrome. The sail’s nylon. No need for a berth, either.
Not fancy, of course – it holds no more than three and has no cabin or amenities. But if you like to sail, it’s pretty inexpensive to own.
This is true. I was thinking in terms of maintenance costs rather than operating, but yeah, a large powerboat will burn up enough fuel to make Al Gore have a panic attack.
It’s no fair comparing a Hobie Cat to anything larger than an aluminum fishing boat. 
Seriously, though, small boats like the Hobie, the 470, or the Sunfish are pretty reasonable to own, and IMHO more fun to boot. Of course, you’re not going to go on an overnight trip, much less sail out to Santa Cruz and back. Of course, nor do most owners of ocean-going boats as well.
The only way you’re going to get three people on a Sunfish is if they’re children. Even with two people you need to be fairly intimate; it’s a perfect boat for single daysailing on a lake or in a harbor, though. It’s not in the size class of boats that the article in the o.p. is referencing, though; there’s no cachet to owning a Sunfish or Lazer.
Stranger
I went to a rehearsal dinner in Hawaii once with a friend who loves boats. It was at a pretty swank house (not huge but obviously expensive) with a canal in back, where the owner’s boat was. Tom went on for, like, twenty minutes to me about the engines on it - I mean, it seemed nice but it wasn’t a yacht or anything, had two motors and looked pretty comfortable, is about it. The owner comes by and Tom asks him if he takes it out much, and the guy said he’d like to take it out more but it costs him about 400 bucks to put gas in it. (Hawaii, remember.)
The local radio starion had a fake ad for a “boat simulator” - the experience of having a boat without all the hassle of actually owning one.
It was a boat shaped paper shredder. Anytime you wanted to simulate the boat experince, just pop a c-note in the shredder and go!
My 17’ kayak is pretty low maintenence (even if it is wood)
Brian
My dad once said, “the second happiest day in a man’s life is the day he buys a boat.”
What’s the first happiest day, then? I asked.
“When he sells it.”
edit: :smack: **Stranger ** already said it!
If you race your sailboat even semi-seriously, you’ll be buying new sails almost constantly. Even (especially?) the modern kevlar sails stretch after a few uses, making them slightly less efficient. A sail for a moderate-sized boat, say 33 feet, can cost a couple of grand.
Even the Sunday sailor will eventually have to pay big money to get a new set of sails – they have a limited lifespan.
That is true. We were so happy to finally be done with the sale. We just sold our 30 foot sailboat this month because we don’t have time to use it anymore as it is in another city and it was languishing by herself. We plan to buy a new sailboat in the future when we have more spare time to use her and spend a few years going places. Just the maintence and upkeep is kind of expensive every month as well as the paying for the slip.
Hauling it out of the water, redoing the rigging, sails, paint. All that adds up, not to mention everytime you walk out of west marine you end up spending several hundred dollars without even knowing it. It is a money pit but the joys of sailboat ownership and sailing outweigh the work, time & money commitment of sailing.
At least the boat owners still get to laugh at the private plane owners. I get all kinds of aviation magazine and the normal terms get way shifted when it comes to money. You can’t even read an article without counting up $100,000 of incidental expenses and that is for the small piston planes. Very small personal jets are often considered a bargain at an entry level purchase price of $4 million. Operating costs per hour are proportionally insane. I still want one though.
That reminds me of the old Navy guideline for sailors: “If it moves, salute it, if it doesn’t move, paint it”. 
I think that’s a Universal Military Constant.
If I remember from my days at the bank, 2/3 of the value of a boat is its engines. We knew this because every September there’d be some absolute IDIOT who forgot to winterize his/her engines before the first frost*. We’d be the ones who had to sign the insurance check over to the marina for the repairs/replacement.
*Metal tends to both expand and contract at a different rate than oil does. When it contracts sufficiently around a full oil reservior, the block will crack. Everytime. :smack:
My brother bought a 26’ McGreggor (sail boat) about 8 years ago.
I’ve been on it 6 or 7 times. I think he has sailed perhaps 20 times. Perhaps.
He lives in Denver. Hardly the sailing capital in the world. It is sort of a desert.
He does not have it in a slip, unless you count my Dad’s driveway as a slip.
He has upgraded it to the tune of about $5000 dollars.
I suspect that it has about 100 times more miles on it on it’s trailer, than it has had on the water. The good lakes to sail this on are about 100 miles away. And he can’t single crew it. Well you could if he got a power roller furling for the jib. But that’s about $1500.
It takes about 1 hour to set the mast and get everything ready and get it in the water after hauling it down the road. That’s if you’re fast.
And on that size boat, you must (or at least I do) have a decent small outboard engine. They are NOT cheep. You have to deal with gas as well. And get everything all hooked up and running. And of course since the outboard is water cooled from the lake, it’s a bit difficult to make sure it’s running properly until the boat goes in the water.
If once you get the boat off the trailer and into the lake and docked, and your engine won’t start, well, that’s where the term cursing like a sailor comes from.
The last time I sailed with my brother, my Wife and Mom on the boat too. I got left off on the dock in a umm sail by so that I could get the truck and trailer to back down the ramp and recover the boat.
The wind came up.
An 8.5 horse engine on a 26 foot sailboat does not quite cut it in 30 mph gusts. Especially a boat that uses water for it’s ballast and that ballast has been mostly emptied. and has a drop down keel board.
I helped the fellow on the previous boat manage to get it on the trailer (vintage Cris Craft) There was only one ramp in this small bay. We needed him out of the way, and he was by himself. I went swimming a couple of times. Wet wallet that day.
All the time my brother was trying to manage what was basically a hockey puck in a stiff wind with an engine on it (ballast was already mostly dumped, sails where down, center board up[mostly, it was only about 8 feet deep]).
I got the guy with the Cris Craft on his way and had to run for the truck and trailer. I got the trailer in the water just in time for the wind to wind down. My brother drove it onto the trailer and all was done.
While regrouping, at the boat, after we got it on the trailer, but before the mast was down, both my Mom and I tried to climb the rear swim ladder. We both got sent to the ground from static electricity from the boat. I’ve been shocked plenty of times from 110. But I have never been kicked on my ass. I had to wonder why in the hell am I laying on the ground?
Boats are fun, but they can be expensive.
I’ve got a few other story’s too if you would like.