I’m sure if you’re considering getting a boat and going cruising on a budget you’ll be getting a shit load of push-back from just about everybody that it just can’t be done. Kind of a bummer that.
The truth is, there’s a plethora of good inexpensive sailboats just waiting for someone to find them and get them back in cruising trim. Of course, they’ll tell you that a cheap boat is just a hole in the water that you throw money in while you get too old to go cruising.
Sound familiar?
I’ll point out that there is, sadly, plenty of fodder for those opinions. I’ve seen boat projects take twenty years to get to a point where they’re abandoned. Way too many projects that lost control of their spending and become an economic ball and chain that insures the project will never come to fruition and let’s not forget the boat projects that led to the breakup of relationships. So, yeah, there’s a lot of evidence that building or refitting a boat can become a clusterfuck of epic proportions.
But, does it really have to be that way?
The thing is, while I’ve seen lots of failed projects swirl down the ceramic bowl of disaster, I’ve seen lots that didn’t. Have you ever wondered why so many people fixate on things negative rather than the positive where boats and boat projects are concerned?
Most folk I’ve known with projects that went south made fairly obvious mistakes that, with a bit of forethought, could have been easily avoided. As they say, hindsight is 20/20.
For the next few posts we’ll be delving into various positive and negative situations and how not to fall into the various traps and pitfalls that lie in wait for an intrepid soul embarking on a boat project.
We have built a number of boats and for our last build we decided to forget waiting for the funds when the money in the boat building account runs out. Instead, we just billed it to our Visa and kept building. That way the momentum never let up and we built our 32-foot Volkscruiser in 18 months part time. We also never missed a bargain on boat parts. At the end of the project, we then made paying the Visa back a priority and worked lots of overtime to pay it back.
Another obvious mistake is custom making parts that can be purchased already made. Buying of the shelf may cost more, but the lost momentum while you muck around reinventing the wheel costs more in the long run.
Cheers