It's been a busy couple months since we returned home. Did a major appliance replacement, recarpeted a room and rearranged a lot of (heavy! :)) furniture. We did manage to fit in a week or so back on the boat, but other than that we've just been busy getting things sorted here at the house.
Nothing new on the future retirement/nomad front. We've looked at and considered a couple options, but still lots to sort, and plenty of time to do it.
I did promise some more posts here, and have been a bit remiss in punctuality. Find below the first of the promised posts, some trip statistics.
- Total miles travelled: 5074.52
- Total engine hours: 698
The miles and hours include the summer shakedown period between 2013-07-15 to 2013-09-24.
- Total Days off the dock: 309
- Marina: 61
- Mooring Ball: 18
- Free Dock: 80
- Lock Wall: 44
- Anchor: 106
Most of the marina days were in the Bahamas, at Sunrise in Freeport (18 days), and Leeward in Green Turtle Cay (16 days). Both places were quite cheap, so no big budget impact there. Most of the mooring ball days were in Vero Beach FL (14 days), which was also quite inexpensive.
Overall we managed to stay free for a total of 230 nights, which is roughly 74% of our trip, so we are quite happy with that. We did stay at a couple expensive marinas, but for the most part we tried to pick places that were at most $1.50/foot, and we even found a few places at $1.00/foot or less.
If my formula on the spreadsheet is correct, out of the 309 days off the dock, we traveled for 144 of those days, or about 47% of the time. Another way of looking at this is that more than half of the time we were not moving the boat, so having a boat you are comfortable living in is very important.
As for fuel, not counting what we already had in the tanks when we left the dock, we put a total of 1376.84 US Gal of diesel into the boat. When we got back to the marina we still had approximately 175 US Gal in the tanks, so I figure we used approximately 1200 US Gal of diesel for the whole time we were off the dock. I don't have any hard and fast price data on what we spent on fuel, but using http://cruisersnet.net and http://activecaptain.com we were able to pick and choose where we refueled. We managed to stay pretty close to or below $4.00/US Gal for our fuel purchases, so averaging it out at $4.00/US Gal we spent about US$4800.00. In reality it was probably less than that, but this is close enough.
This sounds like a lot of money, but we did cover a lot of miles with that fuel. Even nicer is that if you do the math that works out to an average fuel consumption of about 1.7 US Gal / Hour. Not too shabby for pushing about 20,000 pounds of boat through the water... :-) Another way to look at it is that it works out to just below 5 MPG, which is about what you'd expect out of a large RV, so pretty comparable. Certainly a lot better than boats that consume 5 or 10 (or *gasp* even more! :-)) gallons per hour.
I don't have any other numbers for expenditures, but they really are not going to be all that useful anyways. Whatever you spend now for food you will probably spend about the same while traveling by boat. Perhaps a little less in the US, where most things are cheaper, or a little more in the Bahamas where the opposite is true. We probably spent a couple hundred for US and Bahamian cell phones and air time, but that again would depend on what you want for service. We probably spent a little less on discretionary spending (snacks, movies, eating out, etc), but being anchored in the middle of nowhere will do that for you. :-)
Factor in some money for maintenance, such as oil changes, replacements and improvements, etc. Again, these numbers will be different from boat to boat, so not much use posting any numbers for our trip. We were quite lucky in that we didn't have any major maintenance/repair expenses, and the only failure we did have (the alternator) we already had a spare on board. Now that being said, I haven't repaired our bow thruster yet. I think in the end that the Hudson River will end up responsible for a boat dollar or more of repairs... :-)
That's about it for the numbers. If anyone is interested (god help you :)), they can see the Google Docs spreadsheet with all the numbers in it here.
Thanks for this Rick, I find the numbers very interesting and your comments enlightening. Looking forward to talking in person. :-) Was a joy to follow along.
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