Bru
Well-Known Member
When I was younger, we were time rich and cash poor
We were time rich because we worked set hours Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 if you were an office worker or 7:30 to 4:30 if you were on the shop floor. Overtime was entirely voluntary
Could Charles Stock have done what he did with Shoal Waters as a younger man if he'd been working anything up to 12 hour days with no set hours? Indeed, could I have done all the things I did as a young man (competitive dinghy sailing, gigging with bands, etc. etc.) if, as is very often the case today, I didn't know from one week to the next what time I'd finish work on a Friday and whether or not I'd have to work on Saturday morning?
Its not the cash that's the problem for younger people coming into sailing. It's the lack of spare time. Holiday time has improved for sure - we used to get four weeks a year and they were set in stone (factory fortnight in the summer, a week at Christmas and a week at Easter) - but we had every weekend free from 5:00pm on Friday to 8:00am (or whatever) on Monday.
Whether they're office based, on the "shop floor" or whatever, proportionally fewer people in their twenties and thirties have their weekends free than in my younger days. At the clarty end of the working stick they're expected to work whatever, usually anti-social, shifts their employer demands at very short notice and if they're trying to build a career they're expected to dedicate themselves to the job at the expense of all else
Owning a boat is really only worthwhile if you make more, much more, use of it than just your main holidays. And you've got to have time (assuming you're not well off enough to pay somebody else to do it) to maintain it. So you needs a decent number of spare "weekends" which you can reliably plan to spend on the boat.
So yeah, sure, someone in their twenties or thirties can probably afford, if they choose, to own an Anderson 22 or a Centaur. What they don't have is the time to spend on her to make it worthwhile. If you're only going to be able to spend a fortnight a year making good use of such an expensive asset, chartering is a far more attractive prospect
(We did the math on this back before we bought Brigantia some years ago and worked out that to make the cost of owning and keeping a boat of our own, we had to get a rock bottom minimum of 25 to 28 days use out of her a year. Otherwise, it would be cheaper to charter with the added advantage of being able to go somewhere new for our annual sailing fix every year. And I know a number of people who do just that who won't show up in any UK centric survey as sailors but sailors they surely are)
There's a whole lot of other considerations too, many already discussed on this thread and others of a similar ilk, but a lack of, or at least a perceived lack of, spare time is on of the biggest factors IMO
We were time rich because we worked set hours Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 if you were an office worker or 7:30 to 4:30 if you were on the shop floor. Overtime was entirely voluntary
Could Charles Stock have done what he did with Shoal Waters as a younger man if he'd been working anything up to 12 hour days with no set hours? Indeed, could I have done all the things I did as a young man (competitive dinghy sailing, gigging with bands, etc. etc.) if, as is very often the case today, I didn't know from one week to the next what time I'd finish work on a Friday and whether or not I'd have to work on Saturday morning?
Its not the cash that's the problem for younger people coming into sailing. It's the lack of spare time. Holiday time has improved for sure - we used to get four weeks a year and they were set in stone (factory fortnight in the summer, a week at Christmas and a week at Easter) - but we had every weekend free from 5:00pm on Friday to 8:00am (or whatever) on Monday.
Whether they're office based, on the "shop floor" or whatever, proportionally fewer people in their twenties and thirties have their weekends free than in my younger days. At the clarty end of the working stick they're expected to work whatever, usually anti-social, shifts their employer demands at very short notice and if they're trying to build a career they're expected to dedicate themselves to the job at the expense of all else
Owning a boat is really only worthwhile if you make more, much more, use of it than just your main holidays. And you've got to have time (assuming you're not well off enough to pay somebody else to do it) to maintain it. So you needs a decent number of spare "weekends" which you can reliably plan to spend on the boat.
So yeah, sure, someone in their twenties or thirties can probably afford, if they choose, to own an Anderson 22 or a Centaur. What they don't have is the time to spend on her to make it worthwhile. If you're only going to be able to spend a fortnight a year making good use of such an expensive asset, chartering is a far more attractive prospect
(We did the math on this back before we bought Brigantia some years ago and worked out that to make the cost of owning and keeping a boat of our own, we had to get a rock bottom minimum of 25 to 28 days use out of her a year. Otherwise, it would be cheaper to charter with the added advantage of being able to go somewhere new for our annual sailing fix every year. And I know a number of people who do just that who won't show up in any UK centric survey as sailors but sailors they surely are)
There's a whole lot of other considerations too, many already discussed on this thread and others of a similar ilk, but a lack of, or at least a perceived lack of, spare time is on of the biggest factors IMO
