Uncharted Waters: Money, Money, Money
Capt. Bill Pike questions if, financially speaking, we are all up to our transoms in alligators these days.
Quite frankly, I’ve never before in my many decades of writing about boats hatched a column like the one you’re presently eyeballing. But hey, a few things happened a week ago that pushed me over the edge and dropped me into the darkest recesses of reality wherein dwells a subject that occasionally undermines the joys of life afloat, by which I mean money, filthy lucre, dough, cash, moooooolah. For years now, I’ve managed to avoid the topic entirely, thanks to the advice of friends and associates as well as my own, long-held conviction that keeping marine-related financial foibles vague and (Lordy, should I even admit this in print?) sometimes wholly unscrutinized is often the best policy.
But no more! No, not after this!
Like most true tragicomedies, this one began innocuously. After extracting my wash down bucket from my dock box one morning last week I discovered that the bottle of soap concentrate I’m constrained to use to cleanse the Betty Jane II in order to preserve her sparkly paint job was empty, barren, kaput.
“I must buy another quart,” I immediately told myself and, straightway, hit the trail for my friendly neighborhood marine store. But what subsequently happened at the store was not reasonable, or even semi-reasonable, at least in my humble opinion.
“What did you say,” I asked the bespectacled cashier, wondering if I’d heard him right the first time around.
“That’ll be $36.99,” the youngster reiterated.
“For a quart!” I yelped, as my eyes widened into full bug-out mode. “Of boat soap!”
Of course, I bought the stuff—what else was I gonna do? But then, hot on the heels of this horror, an even grimmer, more terrifying event occurred. While tootling blithely through the parking lot of my marina en route to my somewhat delayed wash down, an office worker waylaid me with a thick sheaf of colorful pages that bore the stylish logo of my marina’s new owner, a private-equity outfit. Although the top few pages looked pretty good, featuring as they did some inspiring graphical renderings of the proposed upgrades and addendums Betty and I would soon be enjoying, it was what was at the bottom of the pile that bugged my eyes out even further than the sticker shock at the marine store had—a freshly minted, four-page contractual extravaganza that proposed, in keeping with 29 finely printed paragraphs of terms and conditions, a monthly rate hike of approximately $270.
“Whoa!” I wheezed, struggling to catch my breath. Such an uptick as this, particularly when stacked up against all the money I’d spent on two hurricane haulouts and a couple of related projects during the previous couple of months—to say, nothing of the $36.99 I’d just dropped at the marine store—was turning into a rather challenging little boodle.
Later that day, after finally polishing off the wash down, I spent a moment or two standing at Betty’s varnished-teak lower helm station, leaning on her big, stainless-steel steering wheel, examining the watery world around me through a freshly squeegeed windshield. A sunny chop sparkled out on the river, beyond the marina, and a light breeze occasionally ruffled the burgees across the fairway.
Boating these days, it certainly seems, is getting way more expensive than it used to be. And yes, there were reasonable reasons for this, including skilled labor shortages, supply chain issues and the increasingly wicked storms that are irrevocably boosting marina, boatyard and insurance rates. But while some of us are so deeply synced into life on the water that we simply cannot imagine doing without a boat, regardless of her cost, what about the newbie who is perhaps less committed, knowledgeable, or wealthy? Or the old timer on a fixed income? Answers to these dicey questions, as I stood there enjoying a view I dearly love, were not at all forthcoming, I’m very sad to say.
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This article originally appeared in the March 2023 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/column/uncharted-waters-money-money-money
