Life Aboard: Priorities

I find it sad to see a boat tied in a slip, clearly not being used or cared for. I can’t help thinking that the boat was bought as someone’s dream. A dream to go explore, a dream to go fishing, a dream to have the family spend more time together. Maybe the dreams were realized and maybe they weren’t. Maybe the kids are off to college and the owners don’t get the same enjoyment on the boat without them. The reasons boats don’t get used are as plentiful as there are reasons for initially buying one.

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I get it, the reality of boat ownership doesn’t always match the wind-in-your-face, cocktail at sunset dream everyone envisions. Plans change, people grow old, cost of maintenance gets too high. Any number of legitimate reasons can keep someone from casting off the lines. My message here is one of support and understanding. It’s OK if your situation changes and the boat no longer fits in your plans. But if that is the case, then I encourage anyone who owns a boat and isn’t using it, or anyone who has elderly relatives in this situation, to accept the reality and move in one direction or the other; either figure out how to use it or sell it. This may sound harsh, but it will almost certainly be the best decision for everyone.

Years ago, my wife Dori and I built a new larger boat, requiring us to move to a new marina with larger floating piers. We enjoyed getting to know the family that owned and operated the marina—three generations working closely together. One Sunday, when we returned from an outing, one of the marina owners asked how we found the time to use our boat as much as we did. She added that we probably took our boat out more often than anyone in the marina. My answer was that we didn’t find the time, we made the time. Prioritizing time on our boat was a deliberate act.

Mind you, making the time to use the boat wasn’t always easy. We lived lives as busy as anyone. I owned a business that was demanding, and Dori had a corporate executive job requiring a lot of travel. Maybe this is why prioritizing weekends and vacations on the boat were so important to us. It was our time to decompress from the workweek. The weekends and vacation time spent on the boat also led to the extended cruising life we have today.

Part of our spring commissioning wasn’t just prepping the boat for the summer; it also involved us committing ourselves to use it. Each spring, we would open our calendars and block out several weekends each month to be on the boat. Once the dates were in the calendar, we did our best to hold to that schedule. If something came up conflicting with one of those weekends, or if someone invited us to do something with them, we politely declined and said we weren’t available that weekend. It helped that we also compared our calendars with a few boating friends who did the same.

Dori and I have learned that if we say we want to do something, but don’t put a plan in place to actually do it, it remains just something we always wanted to do, but never quite got around to. The simple act of writing it on the calendar helps. If you include others in your plan, that helps even more. It’s committing time to it and making it a priority. We have friends who have a similar boat to ours that doesn’t get used much. It seems whenever I ask them if they’ve been out on the boat recently, it’s not uncommon for them to say no, because something on the boat is in need of repair. It would be easy to say they don’t use it because they can’t, but I would contend it’s more likely the opposite—they can’t because they don’t. Our experience is that our boat stays in better working order the more we use it.

In the event life has conspired against your dreams, then it may be best to accept this and consider selling the boat. There are good financial reasons for accepting the reality of the situation. Say your boat is worth $500,000 and it costs $50,000 per year just to maintain ownership—that’s an acceptable expense if you’re getting enjoyment in return for the investment, however spending that much money gets hard to justify if you’re not getting any enjoyment out of the boat. Every year you put off selling it, it’s worth less. Every year the cost to maintain it goes up and the value goes down. A neglected boat depreciates at a faster rate than a boat being used and maintained. The pandemic also took a lot of medium-sized, medium-priced used boats off the market, but there is a demand still out there for them. If you have one in good condition, this summer may be an opportune time to sell it while demand is strong.

Dori and I will be cruising from North Carolina to Maine this summer. Hail us if you see Liberdade along the way, we would love to hear the stories about your life aboard, and how you’ve made a commitment to use your boat more often.

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This article originally appeared in the June/July 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/column/life-aboard-priorities