Future of Motorboating

Z

z1ppy

Well-Known Member
Joined
9 Mar 2008
Messages
2,775
Location
New Forest
Visit site
Feeling a little thoughtful this morning....

As you might know, our boat is for sale at the moment and would like to replace it with something bigger and faster...

But in the back of my mind... when fuel gets to £2 per L and its going to cost me £150 to do a cowes round trip for dinner it kinda kills the enjoyment?

Due to work commitments, i dont have the time to spend weeks away on the boat at the moment so our boating is limited to evenings and weekends only. doesnt really justify a large displacement / Semi displacement boat.

At the moment, the prospect of 2 D6 350's sucking up fuel is putting me off changing the boat but deep down, i know the one we have isnt the right one for us!


so..... theres the battery powered greenline thing... maybe a VSV type craft although dont think thats very suited to cruising .....

what other options......
 
You still have to work out the total cost of your boat ownership and then see what percentage fuel accounts for. Its by no means the biggest part when you consider the cost of moorings, servicing, insurance, fettling, travelling to the boat etc. Given that a lot of marina fees have not increased for a year or so (ours haven't) the situation is not as bad as it might seem.

We try to tackle the overall cost of ownership by doing a lot of the work on the boat ourselves, polishing, antifouling, some standard service work.

We will give up a lot of things before we give up the boat
 
Thats a very good point.

Obviously we can all change the way we boat. it used to be we would go out and eat and drink out. Personally i am quite happy on the hook as long as its flat and we can be self sufficient.

Doing the work yourself is great if you have both time and ability. i wouldnt know where to start servicing a drive or engines and not sure how i would go about finding out! cleaning and polishing and general upkeep, agreed and actually when we had the sealine i quite enjoyed that part!
 
I can only have the boat because I do everything myself.

It costs me £4k a year to run the boat, that equates to 2 pints and 20 cigarettes a day, I dont drink or smoke, so I guess its a question of choices.

My take on this is that we deffo wont be doing this tearing around in big power boats and driving German factory hot rod cars with 5 litre V8's in twenty ears time so we best make the most of it now! I want to make sure I get my fair share of fossil fuel!

Follow my advice, get the Hunton and put Ilmors in it.
 
burgundyben said:
I can only have the boat because I do everything myself.

It costs me £4k a year to run the boat, that equates to 2 pints and 20 cigarettes a day, I dont drink or smoke, so I guess its a question of choices.

My take on this is that we deffo wont be doing this tearing around in big power boats and driving German factory hot rod cars with 5 litre V8's in twenty ears time so we best make the most of it now! I want to make sure I get my fair share of fossil fuel!

Follow my advice, get the Hunton and put Ilmors in it.
Click to expand...

BB, thanks. I was thinking of changing my Range Rover and you have definitely swayed me towards the Overfinch. :D
 
Our twin engined 33 footer does 5 gph at 22 knots. Fuel is by far the cheapest part of our equation. It is only going to get more expensive, and each of us will have to work out what we want to do with our disposable cash, if we have any left after HMG takes circa 65% of my income.
 
Something a bit smaller than twin D6's, maybe?

A couple of D3's in something around 30ft is still going to get you places, but won't drain the wells every time you use it.
 
benjenbav said:
BB, thanks. I was thinking of changing my Range Rover and you have definitely swayed me towards the Overfinch. :D
Click to expand...

I really mean it. This is not going to last forever.

I bought a replacement car this year, a Merc C43 (didnt keep, hard suspension gave me back pain), my car buying rules are

1. Always a minimum of 6 cylinders.
2. Always RWD.
3. Always buy the biggest engine that was put in that body.

Overfinch - nice!
 
It is possible to keep the boating budget acceptable in spite of rising fuel costs by doing lots of the necesary maintenance work yourself, perhaps making fewer trips, being a little more frugal with the throttles -so the boating budget overall might stay the same.

However when you do make that short hop over to the IOW you are still concious that you have used up £150 of fuel, so it doesn't make you fell any better.

It's put me off motorboating. I've just sold mine and I'm going to go back to sailing. It was simply the cost of fuel. In the end the thought of spending hundreds of pounds in a weekend on fuel as apposed to 50p in a sailing yacht made my mind up.
 
lets swing away from the Ilmors at the moment cos frankly im not sure my wallet could suffer the fuel costs in any event.

yup, could go for something with D3,s and make compromise.. my heart is saying follow Ben's line of thinking and my head is saying sell the boat and leave them be!!!

Obviously the IPS drives were marketed as a fuel efficient development and the now defunct (i believe) yellow fin project was something similar.

Like Cookee's boat which has twin 260's and a good turn of speed when all sorted but i need some creature comforts to keep the management happy and dont know how that would work there.

Guess this is an unanswerable question in so much as there is no free fuel and making a boat go through or over the water at any speed is gonna take a load of effort.
 
RIN said:
You still have to work out the total cost of your boat ownership and then see what percentage fuel accounts for. Its by no means the biggest part when you consider the cost of moorings, servicing, insurance, fettling, travelling to the boat etc. Given that a lot of marina fees have not increased for a year or so (ours haven't) the situation is not as bad as it might seem.
Click to expand...

I agree with that except to say this. Fuel is the one cost that you see disappearing from your wallet regularly and its also the boating cost that is going to increase faster than all other boating costs in the next few years. Its also the one boating cost which is discretionary in that if you cruise less or cruise slower or buy a more economical boat, you can reduce that cost and who doesn't want to do that in these austere times? And there's another thing. Whether you believe in climate change or not, wasting large quantities of fuel zooming around in a power boat is going to become more socially unacceptable. I'm surprised that some tree hugger somewhere hasn't already cottoned on to the fact that many of us are consuming fuel in our power boats at a rate of less than 1mpg.
So I think there will be an increasing focus on the fuel efficiency of power boats in the future and any manufacturer that can come up with a fast but frugal power boat will be on to a winner
 
Deleted User said:
So I think there will be an increasing focus on the fuel efficiency of power boats in the future and any manufacturer that can come up with a fast but frugal power boat will be on to a winner
Click to expand...

exactly what iam getting at is a much move concise way!

would add to that tho, whilst retaining a degree of luxury onboard...
 
z1ppy said:
Feeling a little thoughtful this morning....

As you might know, our boat is for sale at the moment and would like to replace it with something bigger and faster...

But in the back of my mind... when fuel gets to £2 per L and its going to cost me £150 to do a cowes round trip for dinner it kinda kills the enjoyment?

Due to work commitments, i dont have the time to spend weeks away on the boat at the moment so our boating is limited to evenings and weekends only. doesnt really justify a large displacement / Semi displacement boat.

At the moment, the prospect of 2 D6 350's sucking up fuel is putting me off changing the boat but deep down, i know the one we have isnt the right one for us!


so..... theres the battery powered greenline thing... maybe a VSV type craft although dont think thats very suited to cruising .....

what other options......
Click to expand...

Our boat has been for sale and in all likliehood will be again very soon, and like you we need more space, and more hp in reserve too. Although it hurts when filling up, and makes you think, cripes that trip to Cowes cost me £xxx, I'm trying not to be overly bothered and look at the bigger picture. Based in a South Coast marina, berthing is far and away my biggest annual cash cost, and I'm more concerned about the extra £800pa that I'll be paying to move from 31' to 37' LOA than the extra fuel consumption, which will be £300-400 depending on what we end up going for. In fact, if I can persuage SWMBO to let me have the Grand Mistral 37 HT, (sadly unlikely - she says it's too cramped :mad: <cry smiley/>), if the fugures are to be believed my fuel bill would go down! An SC35 on the other hand looks to burn about 20% more, so maybe an extra £3-400pa on our usage.

IMO, the red stuff isn't going to get to anything like £2/l anytime soon. That price implies roughly a near tripling of oil price once you strip out the ppl duty element. (I paid £1.01 at MDL 'cost' a couple of weeks back = ~70ppl pre taxes) Secondly, even if it made £2/l, my total fuel cost woud still be only about half my berthing fees, which are £12.60 per day, every day, come wind, rain, snow and the odd bit of sunshine. Then there's the depreciation, maintenance, cost of capital,...... best not to add it all up really.

So, we're going for the bigger boat, but not but with more LOA than necessary to meet our needs. My fall back is to move the boat to a cheaper marina rather than give up; life's too short for that.
 
FWIW , my belief is that if you cost out boating to £ per event, it will never make any kind of sense.An example, rafted up with fellow alcoh-sorry boaters, having a table picnic and chilling out is ,as the advert says, priceless.If you costed it out , it would be cheaper to have the Essex pillock on a Puch (Jamie Oliver) bring it out to you.I know which I would rather have
Regards
Rob
 
Dont think there is any doubt that boat owning does not constitute a sound financial investment! its a luxury and i need to keep that in my head to allow my heart to prevail!

interesting about the cost of fuel in terms of overall ownership. i havent broken it down but maybe when i am away next week sitting in the sun it will be a good exercise!

i, like many are of the view, do it now, not wish you had later and if it all goes wrong you have memories!!

soo..... find a buyer for the rib and go Ilmor shopping!! ; )

think mike has it right tho.... a company with a large R&D pot needs to look at a solution here. there must be something!

Rob, your right, some of the best times we have had on our boats are with friends and family. i remember talking some land lubba relatives out and the smiles on their faces as we went down to the needles on a thursday afternoon in the sun was priceless!
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top