The Great Wander

Some of this is repeated from previous blog posts, but I thought a compilation of a few of my learnings might be fun, plus there’s some new stuff in here too.  Living on a boat is different from living in a house, in some ways not a lot different, but in some ways, very different.

1.  Boats are expensive.  As my friend Mark Bowers commented on last week’s post, boat stands for break out another thousand.  For some reason, when you put “marine grade” in front of something, the cost goes up by 50%.  Doesn’t matter what it is, it’s just more expensive.  In the first week that I was here at the boat by myself, I was running around buying things for the repairs that needed to be done.  It was expensive everytime I bought something else for the boat.

By the end of the week, when we were ready to put the boat in the water, I took my propane tanks (10 lb tanks) to the propane shop here in town to be filled.  The guy told me to come back in a few hours and they’d be ready.  When I came back, he said “That’ll be $100.”  I didn’t even blink, I’d become so accustomed to the expense of stuff for the boat, I just assumed for some reason my tanks were hard to fill.  I handed him my credit card and said, “Ok.  Here you go.”  He laughed and told me it was really only $14.  He shouldn’t have said anything, he could’ve had an extra meal out!  But it’s pretty telling of how much it can be to buy parts for boats.  I won’t even go into how much we paid on the electrical rebuild.

2. Everything is going to break.  It’s not if it’s going to break, it’s when it’s going to break.  I detailed a bit of this last week, but it’s still very true.  Boats are always moving. Forward and back, side to side, up and down, all the time.  So, everything is constantly under some stress, and things are going to break.  It’s just a reality.  Even things that don’t seem like they should be moving still are going to break.  You need to be prepared for everything to break and you need to be prepared to not be able to get the part you need.  Even as we’ve been tied to the dock and have had access to stores, there have been parts for my engines that I’ve had to come up with something new to replace them, because the part has been discontinued.

3. Boat people are nice…and opinionated.  I’ve not really discussed the boating community, but I’ve seen enough people come and go through the marina that I have some ideas that boat people are generally pretty nice.  But every single boater has their own opinion about how things ought to be done and they’ll tell you.  Even if you didn’t ask.  Just like all people, some are nice about how they tell you and some are not, but at the end of the day, I’ve not come across too many that won’t share with you their opinion about how to do things.  But if you need help and you say, this is how I want this done, they’ll respect that too.

4. You have to be creative.  Living on a boat, when storage is limited, parts are hard to come by, weather is ever changing, all of those require a degree of creativity that isn’t always required when you live on land.  Yes, home ownership required creativity with all of the remodeling we did, but I never had to figure out if I was going to store food in the floor… I also never had to worry about running the tea kettle and toaster at the same time!  

Creativity is a must on a boat, I would imagine the same is true in a trailer or an RV as well.  It is in a house as well, but in terms of thinking outside the box, there’s a lot of things I never really considered before we moved on board.  

5. Getting things can be hard.  We sold our car two weeks before the lightning strike.  We were going to be moving shortly, so no need for the car anymore.  That’s created some challenges to acquiring everything from groceries to boat parts.  

We’ve mostly been able to either get a ride, borrow a car, or rent a car when we have to get around, which I’m sure you can imagine is a fair amount.  We still need to get groceries.  We still like to go to dinner on occasion.  And of course we need to get boat parts sometimes too.  

It’s just a bit more challenging.  We found this out when we were at anchor in Fruit Cove.  There’s not an easy dinghy dock, so it’s not as easy to quickly jump off the boat and pick something up.  That of course depends on where you are, but generally, yeah, you can’t just jump in the car and head to Home Depot when you need a piece of PVC.  

Every aspect of life has it’s challenges.  Home ownership, boat ownership, you name it, it’s hard.  But when you do things in a traditional fashion, there are things you become accustomed to that aren’t always so easy.  You just need to be able to find ways to adapt to your circumstance.