On the topic of cruising costs and budgets, here's what we here might call some 'counter examples.' I offer this as contrast to the principles and spirit of sailfar, and since the subject of "rally cruising" recently came up with an acquaintance.
First, cruising costs, in general, lifted from
this Noonsite article by Michael Frankel.
Yachting is expensive. Yachting around the world even more so.
Hmmm...I wonder if we should make a distinction between 'yachting' and 'cruising' or 'voyaging.'
I did keep my ears open and I took lots of notes. Over the rally's daily radio chat hour, I frequently heard of blown spinnakers, autopilots that failed and needed replacement, refrigeration failures that needed an expert at the next port, and much more. In port, dockside conversations added to this anecdotal data base with stories of whole generators being air freighted from Europe, motors overhauled, fiberglass repair due to groundings, standing rigging replacement, and an endless procession of expensive specialists to fix this 'n that.
No one was shy when asked about the cost of maintenance. Some actually sounded proud of the expensive repairs. Owners may have been proud of their aggressive sailing or their ability to foot the bills.
More detail on this below; he wrote a whole article just about the equipment failures.
I estimated that over our entire fleet - thirty-six boats ranging from 39- to 73-footers and from brand new to aging twenty-years-olds - the average equipment maintenance and replacement expenses for the circumnavigation ran to $15,000!
...
If you add in the average $18,000 rally entry fee and around $7,000 in worldwide boat insurance, the total comes to $40,000! This estimate does not include consumable items such as food and fuel, communications costs, weather services, hired crews, or travel expenses on shore. It also excludes the two biggest expenses: boat preparations for the rally, the depreciation due to wear and tear of the boat during the rally.
Is it any wonder why we get questions like "Is $3000 per month enough to 'cruise'?" Of course, a significant chunk of that is the Rally fee itself! Holy smokes...$18,000 just to sail in company with other boats, PLUS mandatory insurance together totaling OVER $20,000?
Duke on DISTANT DRUM estimated that getting his twenty-year-old boat ready for the circumnavigation cost around $140,000.
So, just the refit of this one boat cost 7 times the purchase price of a good, seaworthy Sailfar boat?
Sorry, but "Holy Smokes" again. It makes me wonder what that boat was worth to justify spending over an eighth of a million dollars getting her ready.
We continue...
HORNBLOWER, another aging boat, had about $40,000 in new equipment purchases for the trip. In HORNBLOWER's case, all installations were carried out by Bob and I with sweat wages not reflected in the true dollar cost of boat preparation.
Again two-ish times the total purchase price of a good sailfar boat JUST on new equipment and that's not even "true dollar cost"? Seeing stuff like this made the pre-SailFar dreamer in me get quite discouraged.
A new 57-foot Swan purchased for the Millennium Odyssey, reportedly cost upward of $2 million, and was put up for sale at the end of the rally for a mere $1.35 million. This was an unusual example of depreciation, but many boats face major refurbishment expenses after the voyage: painting, varnishing, fiberglass repairs, new rigging, engine and generator overhauls, new sails, canvas work, and much more. A year-and-a-half of hard sailing under tropical sun and salt water can do a lot of damage.
And having an oversized, unduly-expensive-to-maintain boat, 57 feet YIPES, can do a lot of damage to the wallet.
Some boats used hired crews with monthly salaries ranging from a couple of hundred dollars to a couple of thousand dollars per person.
Okay, at some point, it changes from recreational boating to commercial cruising. Again, it's the message to the dreamers that irks here..."I want to see the world, sailing sounds romantic, let's see here, this Noonsite page looks interesting...OH MY WORD, I have to HIRE crew to run my boat for me? I don't want to operate a cruise liner with paid crew. I think I'll go buy a plane ticket."
other [boats] had their crews share in boat expenses. My own expenses for the rally reflect the latter category. I shared in the food and fuel (and occasional docking) expenses. My total room and board and other expenses for the circumnavigation came to approximately $19,900 (about $1,200 per month), broken out as follows:
Rally entry fee $1,600
Food and fuel (my share) 2,100
Inmarsat-C e-mail transmissions 3,200
Mail forwarding 900
Planes, trains, and car rentals 5,700
Walking around money 6,400
His share did not include price of the boat, refit or maintenance. Big chunks were for "personal expenses" like walking around money.
I thought my expenses were reasonable. It was much cheaper than living on land for sixteen months, and a lot more fun.
Reasonable is certainly a subjective term.
On the
equipment article by the same author about the same rally, since boat complexity relates to cost (spiritual, but financial also):
If there is less to go wrong, less will.
Agree with this 100%.
HORNBLOWER was very fortunate in that few failures occurred
the following is considered "few failures." I find this in itself quite an interesting perspective.
Spinnaker pole: Early in the trip the internal line controlling the telescoping feature of the spinnaker pole (Forespar) failed. It was a new pole purchased for the trip. The problem was traced to screws securing a small pad eye holding the line inside the pole. The screws had come undone. The second time the pole failed, with the same problem, the screws were replaced with longer screws. By the third failure, we decided to abandon the control line. Several holes were drilled into both tubes for different length settings, and a long screw was used to fasten the telescoping pole at the desired length. It was an awkward operation to set the length on deck, insert the screw, and then hoist the pole, but it worked for the remainder of the trip.
Those line controlled poles are ridiculously expensive; if they fail that easily, what's the point? For 1/2 the cost, or FAR less, they could have made their own pole akin to what they ended up with anyway.
I recently bought the components to make my own whisker pole...for about 1/3 the cost of purchasing a brand new line control pole from Forespar. How many adjustments to the length do you make on a crossing, anyway, that makes this "screw hole" design that much more awkward? This is not around the buoys racing where the pole is up and down...
Spinnaker pole car: This failure was unrelated to the previous failure. It involved the car used to guide the butt end of the pole up and down the mast track. The car is assembled with plastic ball bearings to smooth the travel along the track. The ball bearings are held in place by a metal cap screwed into the body of the car by two, much too small, (No. 4) screws. The screws fell out and the bearings scattered over the deck. From that point on the car was used without the bearings. It was more difficult to move but not a serious problem.
Again, and as he mentions "not a serious problem" to have a 'stickier' fit, what's the point? How often does that pole height adjustment need to be made at sea?
(Sure, I'm being critical...I'm pretending these were added just for this trip, not that perhaps it was already there on a race boat typically used differently).
Refrigeration compressor: HORNBLOWER had an eighteen-year-old freezer and refrigeration unit (Crosby) driven by either a main engine compressor or a 110 volt compressor. During the first half of the voyage, experts from five different countries came aboard for repairs. We finally gave up on the engine driven compressor and on the thermostatically controlled on-off switch. During the second half of the voyage, the unit was run manually with the 110 volt compressor while the generator was on, about one hour twice a day. Late in the trip, the freon leaked out and the unit was serviced a sixth time. That service lasted about a week. The last long passage of 2,000 miles through the heat of the equator were sailed without refrigeration. A seventh repair in Grenada located another freon leak.
Okay, this is why I don't want refrigeration on my boat, and why I bristled recently when someone seemed to be suggesting I was negligent in not having it. It can be just too big of a problem.
Main engine water pump: The main engine (Perkins 65 HP) is eighteen years old. Despite its age, the engine only had about 200 hours of operation prior to the trip. The water pump bearings and seals failed about a third of the way into the trip. No reason for the failure except age. A new Perkins pump was shipped from the United States.
Diesel fuel pump: The diesel fuel pump on the generator (Kubota 5.5 KW) mysteriously failed. The generator and pump were new at the start of the trip. A new replacement pump was shipped to Tahiti.
Engines do one thing reliably....fail. I think I'd have done without that genset, at least to a port where the part was cheaper to get.
Watermaker: A ten-year-old watermaker (PUR 40) failed repeatedly for mysterious reasons. The unit had been completely overhauled by the factory in spite of the fact that it was a working unit up until the start of the trip. The output of the watermaker was barely sufficient for our needs and we kept it running almost continuously. This may have contributed to its demise. The unit was replaced with a PUR 80, which worked well for the remainder of the trip.
I marvel at the seeming unwillingness of voyaging sailors to drink rain water. Recently, three sailors crossed from San Diego to Hawaii on an Alberg 30, and used 26 gallons of fresh water for the total trip. That's just NOT that hard to carry.
But when LOA gets bigger, EVERYTHING gets bigger...the size of the crew, and thus the water requirements. There's a 27 foot power boat here in this marina with a 50 gallon water tank (my A-30 has 30 gallon presently), so wouldn't these BIG 'blue water boats' not have room for big tankage?
I mean, is a water maker REALLY necessary with all the hassles they seem to cause? (Rhetorical, we've discussed it before).
Sail flaking system: The main sail had a new flaking system (Dutchman) installed with monofilament guide lines and a set of plastic guides glued into the sail. Several times the individual plastic guides came loose from the sail and had to be reglued. At one point, the unattached guide was not noticed for quite some time allowing the monofilament line to "saw" through a few inches of sail material. The monofilament lines also parted several times. This system is not suited for the inevitable chafe of long distance cruising.
Wow. They paid money for that system?
{some minor things that could occur on ANY boat deleted}
Hydraulic steering: The seals on the eighteen-year-old hydraulic steering arm (Hynautic) leaked and were replaced twice on the trip. It was not clear what caused the leaking seals. The second time may have been the result of a misalignment during the previous installation that caused a filing action and a roughening of the stainless ram.
Tillers are simpler. Yes, they can fail, but generally don't as often, and generally pose less of an overall problem when they do.
Drifter sail: A new and infrequently used 1.5 ounce nylon drifter (UK Sailmaker) deteriorated from the sun to the point of ripping in modest winds. The sailmaker concluded that the pink material in the alternating white- and pink-striped sail was not as UV resistant as the white material. He went so far as to say that pink is the least UV resistant sail cloth. The sail was replaced with an all white drifter.
Interesting. In my recent conversation with a sailmaker, cruising boats benefit from heavier nylon light-air sails for just this reason...better sun resistance. Also, she told me that the darker fabrics (in particular, blue) were actually BETTER at resisting the sun than even white. This is NOT true with dacron, she said, but with nylon, it applies.
{more of the typical failures deleted}
RADAR: We started the trip with a small 1.5 KW RADAR (Furuno). It was far too weak to see anything that was not readily apparent to the naked eye. About halfway through the trip we upgraded the RADAR to a 2 KW unit. It was better at "seeing" things further away, but it still felt superfluous to naked vision, especially since our route was far from fog shrouded areas. At night it was much easier to spot masthead lights on freighters long before the RADAR picked up the target.
Okay, now THIS I find super-interesting. The radar added pretty much NOTHING? I grant that in foggy locales, the game is changed, but statements like
"superfluous to naked vision"
and
"much easier to spot masthead lights on freighters long before the RADAR picked up the target."
are very telling.
GPS: During the infamous August 22, 1999 "Rollover" date, one of HORNBLOWER's four GPSs (Garmin) gave erratic readings for a few hours, two stopped working for a day, until we received an e-mail message with instructions on how to reset them, and a fourth worked throughout the "Rollover." The experience made Bob and Judy nervous enough to quickly order a fifth unit for the boat. I suspect they were secretly lusting for the newer model and this was a good excuse. There were no problems during the much ballyhooed Y2K rollover.
This again makes me shake my head a little. Offshore, and off soundings (grin), is GPS really necessary...to the point of FOUR not being enough?
No mention of sextant back-up?
The rest of it is pretty standard stuff that could be issues on any cruising boat (sailfar, KISS or otherwise).
Finally, one closing point from
another article in the same series by Frenkel. Here, he tells the following brief story:
During the 3,000 mile Galapagos to Marquesas passage in the Millennium Odyssey, one of the boats developed autopilot problems, and the elderly British couple reported getting tired of hand steering. Immediately, a nearby Italian boat volunteered a couple of crewmembers and plenty of pasta to complete the passage.
Though this particular failure did not end up costing $$, it did cost in terms of 'sense of accomplishment' for that British couple. Further, autopilot failures are common enough that I wonder sheet-to-tiller gear is not espoused by the 'rags' as good, low-cost backup gear.
Pat Henry, during her circumnavigation, tried sheet to tiller steering after her umpteenth autopilot failure, and she remarked that it worked so good and was so simple she wished she'd used it earlier.
Why is such a simple, low-cost solution to a potentially significant problem (being too exhausted to steer) not included in the rally's required 'safety gear?' Required gear like EPIRBs only help AFTER catastrophe, but some things can help PREVENT catastrophe.
I shake my head...it's almost as if there is some "force" preventing simple, low-cost solutions from being utilized. What a shame for that British couple: that they could not complete their crossing via their own resourcefulness.
And what a shame for that fellow out there dreaming of taking his family on "the trip of a lifetime" and this is the only kind of 'voyaging' information and stories he reads.
Here's to hoping they find Hiscock, the Pardeys, James Baldwin's site and perhaps Sailfar.net.
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