By Jackie –

What do you have to sacrifice to live on a boat

When we bought our boat we almost died laughing at the giant pink marble sink in the “master ensuite” (the head in the bow) and judged the previous owner HARD for putting it in there. I mean … come on! So much extra unnecessary weight and … come on! This is a boat after all not a house. Tom always said that boating is like camping on the water so we would only bring with us the bare necessities when we sailed for fun and when we raced the boat and we had even fewer necessities to help reduce the weight of the boat and improve the speed. Sailing and racing was fun but Tom’s ultimate goal was to take the boat south and live on it in the winter. Every winter, all winter. Camping. Now, until I had met Tom my idea of camping was a hotel (not motel) that did not have room service – like a Club Med. I like my house and car and tvs, and fully stocked kitchen and too many clothes, and …This cruising thing was clearly not going to work.

The first year of cruising was an adventure and we were spending a lot of time travelling through the US lock and canal system so we were never too far from civilization. Doing without … practically everything … was all part of the adventure and we always had in the back of our mind that anything that we really needed to have would be just an Uber away. Then we sailed to the Bahamas. That was different. By the time we got back home from spending 3 months living on the boat in the Bahamas we decided to throw out the whole “camping on water” theme and take more of a “condo instead of a house” approach. Forget giving up all of the comforts that make life enjoyable for us and just scale them down instead. At home we watch a lot of tv and movies so we bought a tv for the boat. We bought an ice maker for cold drinks, a new inverter so that I can charge my laptop when I want to not just at restaurants on shore, bought unlimited data so that we can stream Netflix, a coffee grinder because I live for really good coffee and I even brought a hair straightener for the odd glamour day. Oh, and this year I am bringing a food processor with me and Tom is talking about getting a watermaker.

When people who are thinking of buying a boat ask us how much they are going to have to sacrifice to live on a boat we tell them that if you want to have boating then you need to make the boating life work for you so if you are having to give up everything that makes you happy then why bother. The guy who put the giant pink granite sink on the boat probably did so because it made him happy. I can honestly say that I don’t laugh at that anymore. Well … maybe just a little because that was one crazy sink. 😉

Our new rule – downsize instead of giving up. It makes for much happier boaters who stay boaters.