Depending on where you live, you may only be able to use your boat 4-5 months a year. If you work, that’s probably limited to weekends and not every weekend is going to offer boating weather. This makes the upkeep even more prohibitive as the costs are pretty much hard costs.
Here in Minnesota last summer, there was an article in the paper about how all these people with million dollar boats couldn’t afford the gas to use them anymore. $4/gallon gas at 1 mpg is what they were talking about.
Yeah, broke my heart. You with your million dollar yacht can’t cough up $4 a gallon? How tragic.
My 17’ featherweight aluminum canoe, however, just cost me $21.50 to renew the license for another three years. I think I bought some life jackets in kid sizes last year. I might have to buy a new battery for the trolling motor this year. Yup, the thing just soaks up the cash!
I want to do some cruising when I retire. I did some when I was young and single. I crewed across the Atlantic on a 55ft wooden ketch. Problem is that I don’t really sail well enough to skipper my own live-aboard sized cruising yacht. So that means that between now and retirement I need to get experience. I don’t have much time to spend: as it is the weekends seem to finish with a longer list of things to be done than there was at the start. Still, my plan is to buy some sort of as-low-maintenance-as-possible yacht in the next few years to begin learning on (and indeed to see if I like it as much as I recall, and if my wife likes it at all). I’m thinking small, staid, and as much GRP as possible.
However, to the OP: when I crewed on a cruising yacht, the owner and his girlfriend lived aboard: they had no other home. We spent a couple of hours every morning on maintenance five days a week, and had the afternoon off. I didn’t mind, I generally like that sort of thing. But that gives you an idea how much maintenance is required. I guess the time we had to put into it (given that we were living on board) kept the dollars down, but the owner still spent a lot on gadgets and breakages.
My dad had a catamaran. He stood it up on some wood blocks in our back yard untill he got around to painting it and fixing it up enough to sail with it again.
The thing took up about 20 percent of our backyard, as Dutch backyards aren’t big.
It lay there for seven years.
Then my mom finally nagged my dad into giving/sellling the damn thing to some other schmoe.
I enjoy sailing, but it certainly sounds like the way to go is to make friends who have boats 
It’s also worth remembering that on a car, you can sometimes skimp a bit on maintenance, maybe stretch out a service interval, or perhaps a wheel bearing is rumbling and you leave it longer than you should perhaps because you are a bit short on the cash.
On a boat, especially a powered one, you cannot do this, if the season is changing, you cannot delay, you absolutely must winterise the engines or face a bill for $kkk.
You cannot leave things like control cables another day for stripping and regreasing, stuff seizes up so fast that if you wait a week, you’ll end up having to replace the inner and outer cables and probably stripping a few clamps on the way, you will cause yourself weeks of full time work - the spares are always on their way and never available instantly.
Often there is not a set period or schedule to carry out maintenance, you just do it because you are not busy sorting out some other issue, for instance, you run you fuel right down and then fill up from another location.This makes it a real good time to check your fuel filters, large fill ups from near empty tanks can disturb crap at the tank bottom, it woud probably be better to wait a few days after such a fill up before running. I have heard of folk checking the fuel quality before the fill up using tester kits, but most of the problem is from grotty tanks.
Failing that, you’re going to have to check them pretty regular for a while, meantime, you’d better keep a running check on all your engine hoses, they can split with little warning of just become detatched, whilst you are at it, make sure to check the alternator connections are still tight, …and the list of constant checks goes on and on.
If you fuel filters do clog up bad, you’ll be out on the water when you find out, your engines will stop and you may well have to bleed the system down and recharge it, hopefully you kept your batteries well maintained so that you can get restarted.
Time is perhaps the biggest cost, if you don’t do the work yourself, then it’ll cost you bigtime, not many folk can afford this.
I’ve a 16 foot Prindle catamaran for use on Lake Michigan.
It’s a pretty spartan rig, and between sailings I can just pull it up on my beach, and hope we don’t get a heavy storm that sucks it into the lake. So it’s not costing much at all.
But in recent years it has stayed in the barn. It’s just a bit much for me to handle by myself these days (rotator cuff troubles), and Mrs. Mercotan doesn’t seem to enjoy wading in 50 degree water just to get launched, then get pitched into said water once we get moving.
Also, Lake Michigan can get pretty tricksy pretty quick. I’ve seen it go from perfect sailing conditions to 10 foot swells in about two minutes, and I turtled the damn thing more than once, including one time I pinned the mast into a shoal so the damn thing wouldn’t even drift into shore.
Then there was the time I flipped it on a sunny, windy day. The air temperature was 93, the water temperature was in the mid 40’s. That day, I got both hypothermia and a nasty sunburn.
So even though it doesn’t cost me much out of pocket, it still can endanger my life to take it out!
I like to watch sailboats go by from my hot tub.
I sail and maintain a 26’ Tuckerton Bay Sailing Garvey. It is one of the only ones left in the world. It is all wood and this one is 30 year old now. The design is from 1733. It is owned and operated by Monmouth County Friends of Clearwater. {MCFC}
We have a donated berth, free labor, (myself and other members), much donated materials and it still cost MCFC a lot of money in insurance, registration, trailer registration and non-donated supplies.
I could never imagine owning an old wooden sailboat on my own. It would either cost a fortune or be a full-time job to maintain her and keep her going.
Here is a picture of the Adam Hyler with sails raised at the Clearwater festival.
The bottom paint for the boat costs at least $60 per gallon. It takes at least one gallon per year. We often have to build and replace parts of the boat. This year, the front deck, and many pieces of trim and our front combing rail and main cleat post all had to go. Next year we will be replacing a few ceder planks. We build our spars, oars and sticks by hand. If we had them built they would cost a small fortune. The sails would cost $3000 to $5000 if they ever need to be replace. Sailboats can easily be very expensive.
Jim
Well, a friend of a friend actually sailed his 16 foot Hobie out to Santa Cruz Island single handedly. He’s one of those crazy Scandinavian dudes. He got caught in the wind shadow and had to hand paddle the last mile.
Sorry for the hijack, but did you see that I Shouldn’t be Alive episode?
They take a 16 food Hobie to the Sea of Cortez and don’t tell anyone where they are going. One of the guys has never been on a sailboat before. They overload the boat with something like 500 pounds of gear. They get caught in a storm and start taking on water. They cut loose their fresh water supply. I’m kind of an idiot sailor but I look like friggen’ Sam Neill in Dead Calm compared to those morons.
Jim, while we’ve probably never met, I’m pretty sure that I saw your vessel once or twice sailing on the Hudson (saw it from the window of where I used to work). If I’m wrong, then there’s another ship around there whose sails are about the same size & shape as your vessel’s.
You are supposed to be standing in a cold shower wearing clothes while you do this 
During the 1999-2000 America’s Cup in Auckland, we went for a tour round the Viaduct Basin to look at the SuperYachts - the playthings of people like Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Paul Allen (Microsoft). These were massive and beautiful, and cost over 10 million ($US) and have an upkeep that ranges from 10-30% of value per year. Oh, and they mostly got shipped to NZ on a SuperYacht Carrier. :eek:
Si
In Spain we say that a car is worse than a retarded kid. A sailboat ranks somewhere at “retarded triplets.” Depending on how bad you’re about it, it can go up to quints.
I’ve always heard “If it floats, flies or f’cks, it’s cheaper to rent it” 
VCNJ~
A friend has a 16 ft Hobie that he races. I was his crew on Lake Erie , when we had a catastrophic failure of a (IIRC) boom-vang tang during practice the day before race-weekend.
We searched the east coast for someone who would sell a replacement part within driving distance, but couldn’t find one. None of the other sailor’s had one. We eventually found a wrecked Hobie on the beach. The only salvageable part on the boat was exactly what we needed.
A little liquid wrench and we were good to go. Finished second in our class, and we were the talk of the beach.
A friend of the family had a large cruiser, and that’s even worse than a sailboat since you need to buy gas.
The thing I remember was all the tedious chores, like wiping down the topside of the boat every morning so you wouldn’t get crud from the dew evaporating.
yes, owning a boat is for rich people only. It is possible for a working-class person to own one, but only if he does all his own maintainence. As was pointed out, parts for things nautical cost 2-3 times what they do for a car. For example: a Chrysler marine V-8 engine (short blaock0 can be as much as $5000-while for a car, its about $1500.
i predict the high cost of fule this year will drive the blue collar boaters away-which should please the rich boaters immensely (too many peasants interfering in things)!
We have almost never had the Garvey on the Hudson, so I would guess someone else is using a Sprit Rig Ketch setup with Tan Barq Sails.
I have been on the Clearwater up your way several times. She is a very large Hudson River Sloop.
Jim
That would be the bench at Pier 3 on Wednesday evenings in Thunder Bay, Ontario. If you sit there at that time, you will be asked to crew for any number of boat that race that evening.
(Or if you are into canoeing, my outrigger crew is often looking for a couple to join us on Pier 1 on Thursday’s at 6:30 pm.)
I spent yesterday on a friend’s 36’ Mirage (it’s first time in the water this season). As he came across parts that needed replacing, I couldn’t help but think “Glad I don’t own this.”
Michigan is such a place. In case you’ve never thought about it, Michigan has more coast than any other state in the union, and despite the short season we have the second most amount of registered water craft (only Florida beats us). The thing about us, though, is we know how to enjoy the season. Come autumn, the boat goes into storage and we pull out the trailer for a bit of late season camping. Next they go into storage and out come the snowmobiles. When they go into storage, it’s a miserable period of time when there’s not much snow and it’s too cold to boat, but as soon enough the boats come back out.
Blue collar isn’t necessarily working class. I’ll tell you that the blue collar boats vastly outnumber the number of rich-people boats. It really all depends on which hobbies you choose to spend your time and money on. People that don’t have the luxury of hobbies certainly wouldn’t try to buy a boat in the first place.
I’m curious about this. How much gasoline does a boat really use? The example above was 1 gallon every 3/4 mile, but what size boat was that? What would you expect out of an average, 19" bow rider with a run of the mill 150hp inboard outdrive engine? These are economical boats and lots of what you see here, and so I’m genuinely curious. FWIW, the newspapers have been running stories about people that can’t use their boats due to the price of gasoline, but damn, what’s the difference between $30 to fill up and $60 to fill up if you get a full day of enjoyment out of it? On a tangent, I see similar stories for people that won’t drive on vacation any more – so your gasoline cost to go “up north” (as we so do here) changes from $60 round trip to $120. If $60 breaks the bank, perhaps you shouldn’t be going on vacation in the first place (or own a boat for that matter).
Oh, yeah, it’s usually the rich guys that spoil everything for the normal joe, 'cos like I said, it’s the normal joe that’s filling up the lakes.
But if it’s anything like Upstate NY, you get a couple weeks to look at the raging waterfalls.