I always assumed a good portion of them were rentals.
Charter yachts can be spotted relatively easily. They have standard small name design, sail small flags and are mostly pretty standard yachts. No expensive extras, mostly basic and relatively well maintained if boring
My dad used to own a sailboat, which was a high point for someone squarely middle class. We’re talking a 44 ft sailboat.
These things are holes in the water who the fuck wants a boat
As the saying goes:
The two best days of a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat, and the day they sell the boat
the upkeep alone - painting scraping replacing the anode every fuckin year… it’s a fuckton of work for a ‘fun hobby’
The costs involved with boats is why I have a kayak instead.
I have two boat friends. One has a 20’ sailboat, it’s just under yacht size. The other has a dingy he built in his garage. The dingy gets far more use.
I do wish I had storage nearer the sea for it though. It’s about 20-30 min walk from where we live now and need to get it moved to our new house at some point. Don’t really have a suitable spot for it to go yet. Or it would be a pain to get in/out.
time to make a friend on the beach you can stash it with :D
I used to dream of living on a sailboat. Then a friend of mine who owned one took me out for a ride and I was so seasick I had to jump into the water and be towed back to the dock. So much for that shit.
At the height of being poor in like '83 or so (mortgage rates to 17%; just ponder that) we panick-moved to a smaller town with a union job but found a fixer house with an attached shop.
Dad, ever the salesman and skilled labourer, would do work for people in exchange for wood-working tools: Old window Jenkins would part with Lester’s Table Saw if Dad re-tiled the shower.
So we got tools. And he traded for plywood and plans. And suddenly we had a dory he could fit on top of this '75 econoline150 van. And fishing was great. But it was a lot of rowing this pig of a boat.
So he modded it with a dagger-board and a mast port. Took him 5 min to rig it and he was set for fishing.
Those summers camping because we couldn’t afford to do anything else but at least gas was cheap, they were awesome.
I think these people just have shiny boats, which are too expensive. If you want to find them, they’re finishing the Penske file so they can still afford exorbitant Slip fees and dream of Taking the Boat Out with the estranged family members who will then love Dad again and make up for all this toil. Dude needs a cheap ugly van and a wallowing pig of a dory to ‘sail’ around a lake in the woods; aim smaller and actually go make memories.
At the height of being poor in like '83 or so (mortgage rates to 17%; just ponder that)
FWIW A mortgage payment at 17% interest on the $20,000 my parents paid for my childhood three bedder in 1980 was cheaper than a single mortgage payment i make today.
How do you make a small fortune?
Start with a large fortune and buy a boat.
Bust
Out
Another
Thousand
I used to work at a fish market, and one of the fishermen we dealt with once won a large sum of money from a big fishing tournament. When they asked him what he was gonna do with the money, his response was, “Keep fishing until it’s all gone.”
Bring Out Another Thousand
Meh, a boat is a hole in the water to dump money into, a car is a hole in the road, and a house is a hole in the ground. At least the boat combines the advantages of the other two.
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.
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
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.
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Having spent a lot of time in Marinas, I can say this 100% matches my experience.
Sailboats aren’t prohibitively expensive for a normie, especially if you buy a used one. If you look at the large empty houses near every harbor though, you’ll see a better sign of the wealth disparity. The rich own multiple houses worth millions each and they seem to be rarely used while many people can’t afford a starter home now.
Buying a boat is cheap, owning one not so much. Between marina fees and maintenance it adds up really fast.
As my dad would say, “A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.” Boats are cool and fun if you like to sail, but between maintenance costs, mooring fees, the cost to take it out of the water and store it at a boat yard once the season is over, scrape the barnacles off, repaint it, etc. it’s not a cheap endeavor.
That’s why the only reasonable way to own a boat you can’t trailer is to live on it full-time.
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In the 40s, the Soviets tried to use Grapes of Wrath as anti American propaganda on their people. It failed because their citizens were impressed that even the poor abused people could afford a car.
That would be like people being impressed the average person has a horse in a desert. Just because you have one doesn’t mean it’s been taken care of.
What’s the horse’s name, just out of interest?
It’s the desert, you’re just happy you’re out of the rain.
Still better than none.
You can buy a beaten up old aluminum dingy for very little, and make it worth your while by bringing home seafood.
You can have a boat for quite cheap.
Everyone is secretly millionaires
Except you, of course.
Ewww, gross, it’s the poor.
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.
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
And it costs literally nothing to go take it out on the water.
You sound like a boat salesperson.
Tell me how it’s incorrect.
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.
fixing boats properly is expensive, but you also don’t really need to do that
Yeah, this sounds like really bad advice…
everywhere I go in the world there are giant marinas with a million boats
I’ve told a MILLION times to NOT EXAGGERATE!
And how do you get to go everywhere in the world, that marinas stand front and center of your attention? Could it be that you go… on your boat?
“I swear to God it smells like shit everywhere I go!”
A friend of mine used to work in a yacht club, albeit a very small one on a river, not the sea. He was firmly convinced that at least half of the boats belonged to the owners of craft businesses. He was of the opinion that the boats were bought with black money, either to be able to do something with the money or to sell the boats again later and launder the money that way. I don’t know if that’s true.
This is a different kind of boat, but I met someone recently who lives in a houseboat like this and apparently it works out cheaper than buying a house near where they work. It’s moored on the Thames, some way upriver from London.
The funniest part was how relatively normal this person was. They work as a lawyer.
Narrowboats are expensive tho.
They’re the vw campers of the waterway.
Expensive and usually very old and very rotten.
plus you can only really do inland waterways with them. i much prefer sailboats
These are crazy popular in and around London, even among fairly ‘normal’ people.
The housing crisis is just so bad that they are comparatively quite affordable (even once you include the long-term/ongoing costs).
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.
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.
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.
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.
This boat made me fixated on the idea of buying a boat and living in it.
While the buying part is plausible.
The living is a lot fucking harder.
You have to really like being on the water. It’s just as hard as living in an RV off grid.
It’s probably a bit easier to live in a boat, since it’s common (and I guess legal) for marinas to allow people to live in their boats while docked there. I own a skoolie (used school bus converted into a motorhome) and it is nearly fucking impossible to find anywhere that I could legally live in it - especially anywhere near big cities. Ironically, I’ve even tried contacting marinas to see if I could live there in my skoolie and they’re all like “hell no you fucking hippie”. I wonder if I could buy a barge, park the bus on it, and then live in a marina.
That would be hilarious. But are you over the size limit for national parks? Because that was always my RV life plan. Just getting national park and BLM spots.
My bus is 35’ long so it fits in (most) parks AFAIK. It’s fine for BLM of course, but I don’t really want to live that isolated.
There are some surprisingly close to urban centers, but yeah it definitely limits where you can be.
Better hurry it up, they’ll probably be gone in a year.
Have a friend who would go north in the summer to work on forest fires and would come back to his sailboat at the end of the season to spend winter at the marina, he doesn’t even know how to sail…
It’s usually a divorced guy
