Reality and Acceptance

This post will be a discussion about the realities of a full time cruising lifestyle, and the understanding and acceptance of these realities.

Now, I haven't done this kind of post before as I find so much of this to be totally subjective.  What one person would consider to be a high point of the cruising life, another would think it a negative.  This subject has also already been well covered by other blogs, and a simple google search can turn up more than I would be able to add.

So in summary, as long as you are able to come to grips with things like living in a small space that is constantly in motion (sometimes relatively violent motion :-)), basic chores such as shopping, laundry or even just getting on solid ground for a walk being much more of a challenge than normal, and having all aspects of your life being decided for you by the weather, then you are good to go.  While it can be a great lifestyle, it really isn't all sipping umbrella drinks while sitting on the deck in the warm sunshine (although that does happen occasionally :-)).

But that's not really what this post is about.  What I want to write about in this post is what the realities of having a full time cruising lifestyle are for a Canadian.  Specifically Canadians that wish to keep their provincial health care, return back home with their boat each year and not just keep pointing the bow south.  Oh, and I'll limit my treatment of this topic to life aboard an economical trawler.

There are some major considerations that have to be taken into account within the context of the previous paragraph.  The first is retaining your provincial health care coverage, which in our case being from Ontario is OHIP.  Each province is a bit different, and I'll only speak to OHIP, but in Ontario OHIP allows you to be out of the province for 212 days (roughly 7 months) for each 12 month period.  What this means in practice is that if you cross the border for your southbound migration on the 15th of October, you have to be back in the province by the 15th of May in the following year.  Mid October can make for a bit of a late date to be heading down the US east coast, but you can't really leave earlier as the Erie Canal only opens on the 1st of May, assuming no issues with the spring thaw.

OHIP does allow for an extended absence from the province for a period of up to two years, but you are limited in how often you can use this.  After an absence of longer than 212 days you have to adhere to the normal rules for the next five years.  This basically means that a full time Canadian cruiser, wishing to keep his health care coverage, has to limit his travels out of Ontario to the 212 days every year.

There is another limitation that has to be taken into consideration, and it can be quite a tricky one.  As a Canadian citizen visiting the United States, you can only be in the US for a total of 182 days in a 12 month period.  This seems to be mainly a function of US tax laws, but is also sometimes enforced by US Customs and Immigration.  In my research on this I've found that it is enforced a little haphazardly in border stations, but the real enforcement agency for this seems to be the IRS.  There is a calculation that you make to find out if you need to be giving Uncle Sam any tax money.  Basically you take all of the days you've spent in the US in the current calendar year, add 1/3 of the days from the previous year, and 1/6 of the days from the year before that.  If your total is >183 then you may be liable to pay taxes in the US.  There is a form that you can fill out (IRS form 8840) to provide you an exemption, but looks like it requires at a minimum home ownership in Canada.  One reference I found said that if you limit your stay in the US each year to less than 122 days you will be okay with this calculation.  A quick bit of math shows that 121 days per year is indeed golden.

This means that you'll have to get out of the US for at least part of the winter each year.  At a minimum, you'll need to spend at least 30 days out of the US to stay within the 182 days, and that assumes you can meet the 8840 exemption criteria.  If not then you have to be out even longer, at least for 61 days (182 days - 121 days).  Okay, so this isn't so big a problem really, as the Bahamas is within easy reach from Florida, and two months in the Bahamas each winter fits the bill perfectly.

Finally, the last reality you have to come to grips with is the transit time from the Canadian border to Florida.  Using our style of travelling at an economical pace of about 7 knots as a benchmark, it takes roughly two months to make the journey south in the fall, and two more north in the spring.  This factors in time for weather delays, sight seeing, etc.  This means that of your seven months out of the country, four of them will be spent travelling up and down the US east coast.

So let's see how this all adds up for a Canadian trying to live the full time cruising lifestyle.  Our first reality, and the basic structure of this cruising lifestyle, is that you have 212 days out of Canada.  You leave Canada somewhere around the middle of October, travel for two months to get to Florida, and out of the next three months you spend at least two of them in the Bahamas (Cuba might be a viable option in the future).  After returning from the Bahamas, you have until about the middle of March to relax before you start your northbound trip, arriving back to the Canadian border somewhere around the middle of May or so.  From there you have until the middle of the next October to enjoy Ontario's waterways, which thankfully are fantastic, vast and not short on great variety.

Of course, there are many ways to be a cruiser.  You can just say chuck it to your provincial health care and head on down into the Caribbean indefinitely. 

You could be a "commuter cruiser", putting your boat up someplace warm in the south and drive or fly to it each winter.  We met a few Canadian couples that do just that, keeping their boats in Green Turtle Cay in the Bahamas, putting them in the water in the fall and taking them back out in the spring when they return home to Canada.  We thought that was a pretty neat idea, but it doesn't work for me, at least right now.  Our Ontario waters are too nice to not be out on in the summer, so it would be pretty hard for me to give that up.

Hey, if you win the lottery you could own two boats, one as your Canadian summer boat and one as your 'down south' winter boat!  Not holding my breath for that one... :-)

Another option is to have an offshore capable boat, and do one or more hops on the Atlantic to cut down on the transit time.  Unfortunately, I couldn't afford an offshore capable trawler (check out the prices on a Krogen or Nordhaven).  Also, this somewhat misses the whole point of a cruising lifestyle where its about the journey, not just the destination.

So, there you have it.  These are the realities you have to understand and accept if you want to live a full time trawler cruising lifestyle as a Canadian, and all the while keeping both OHIP and the US tax man happy.