It seems obvious to me how costs get out of control when you start thinking bigger boat but, from reading many emails from readers of Boat Bits, a lot of folks think there is some sort of magic workaround that allows them to get around it. I think it has something to do with magic beans or some such…
Bigger just costs more and it’s a fact, just like death and taxes, that is inescapable. So, what’s a poor boy going to do?
In my own case, I’d really like to have a fifty-foot schooner…
George Buehler’s Melquiades is pretty close to what I have in mind. It’s a pretty simple and easily built design so why don’t I build one?
The simple fact is that just about the best I can do to put a boat on the water as a home builder comes out at around $10 a pound and if we look at the displacement of Melquiades, which is 61,500 pounds, that makes for a $615,000 price tag… Can you spell O-U-C-H?
Being ever the optimist on things non-political, I have a feeling that just maybe, I could actually build a Mel for maybe $7 a pound (hey, I’m real cheap and great at scrounging) but that still leaves me with a bill around $430,500…
So let’s take a look at what happens when we get into the under 40-foot zone and, since we started with a Buehler boat, will stick with his 37-foot Jenny design. Jenny displaces 25,480 pounds so that brings my costs to somewhere between $178K to $250K which is a lot better but still way too high…
Obviously boats with a serious chunk of displacement are going to be problematic for the person on a VolksCruiser budget…
More on this soonish!