Had this dream since childhood - considering making it a reality

@maby - Thanks for the info. Yes, I understand that wooden hulls require more maintenance. I would prefer steel. I'll have to look and see if the job of antifouling requires any particular skill or is just laborious. Maybe I could pay for the lifting and do the work on it myself. Wooden hulls- Every 3 years or so? I'll look into it.

@temptress- Yes the cost would be too prohibitive to make any headway on the actual boat improvements I think, or have a life, let alone go travelling which I'd want to do as often as practical.

@Eyore- She is indeed a pretty boat from the pics of her. I've not got a problem with her smallness per se, I like things cosy. The only problems I can see is the lounge looks tiny, no space for my hobbies. Minimal storage. Can't get a trail bike on the deck. I suppose I could stow an inflatable dinghy and outboard on her somewhere if travelling. What I like about this boat is, assuming it is fully sea worthy, I could take her anywhere. Just work for a year and disappear alternately. I can't see the engine specs anywhere but the research Ive done in the past indicates to me that fuel cost would not be extortionate. Which leads me to my next question....

What do you guys do about internet when travelling and what are speeds like at moorings generally? I don't watch TV but I study online, can't live without internet.
 
Best of luck forestboy. Your idea of not taking whatever you buy out for 5 to 10 years whilst you receive professional training and gain experience is exactly the right idea. The yacht I posted about is fitted out exceptionally well as a static liveaboard home but can be sailed by just two hence I thought you might like to see her.

My wife's book is an excellent book for those who have started dreaming, send me your details and I will post you a free signed copy.

When I first started posting on here 12 years ago I knew nothing, but despite the odd detractor the forum nurtured me along and encouraged my crazy dream

I will never forget the day swmbo and I cast off on what was to become our 8 year adventure when a totally unknown to us forumite, who had been reading our posts, came to the marina and gave us a bottle of good luck Champagne!

It was a wonderful gesture and although the forum is a very different place now, there are still those on here that have the same sense of encouragement.

All the best
 
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forestboy said:
@maby - Thanks for the info. Yes, I understand that wooden hulls require more maintenance. I would prefer steel. I'll have to look and see if the job of antifouling requires any particular skill or is just laborious. Maybe I could pay for the lifting and do the work on it myself. Wooden hulls- Every 3 years or so? I'll look into it.

...
What do you guys do about internet when travelling and what are speeds like at moorings generally? I don't watch TV but I study online, can't live without internet.
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Nothing special about antifouling - just clean the surface, rough it up a little and apply another coat or two. Every few years you may need to sand back more aggressively otherwise the coating becomes inches thick or starts to lose adhesion and flake off. There are various types of antifouling - soft ones that are easy to apply but only last for a year and harder ones that are more work to apply, but can last multiple years.

Wood is more touchy than metal or plastic (GRP) - obviously, it will rot if not adequately protected and it does shrink if allowed to dry out too much - if you haul the boat out and leave it in the yard for several months, it will leak like a sieve for the first few hours after launching.

Most marinas offer public access wifi internet at a reasonable price - often included in your mooring fee. Otherwise you need to rely on 3G - coverage can be patchy - ok in most ports, but many liveaboards seek deserted bays and rivers far from civilisation and signals can be poor.
 
forestboy said:
I understand that wooden hulls require more maintenance. I would prefer steel. I'll have to look and see if the job of antifouling requires any particular skill or is just laborious. Maybe I could pay for the lifting and do the work on it myself. Wooden hulls- Every 3 years or so? I'll look into it.
Click to expand...

Antifouling is very easy and loads of people do it themselves. It's simply painting toxic paint onto the bottom of the boat. The paint is expensive and you don't want to swallow it. Needs done every year and in some locations you may need more expensive paint, whilst in others you can get away with the cheaper stuff.
No hard and fast rules about how often you should lift a boat out. I would have thought an old MFV would live happily in the water all the time, only being dried out or slipped for actual work (e.g. caulking, replacing planks, other below-the-waterline jobs).
Steel boats require maintenance too! Annual anode change (I think- having not owned one myself) and if you scrape the hull below the waterline you will need to touch up the paint there or risk rust.

What do you guys do about internet when travelling and what are speeds like at moorings generally? I don't watch TV but I study online, can't live without internet.
Click to expand...
Some marinas have wifi, but generally I use my smartphone as a mobile hotspot giving sufficient bandwidth for emails etc. Obviously you could just use a dongle but most people have a smartphone anyway it seems. Coverage will vary hugely depending on where you are.
 
Thanks again Maby. And thank you Mavanier. Yes I hadn't thought of wireless dongles. Be good for back up for sure. Hopefully they've come down in price since I last enquired about them.

@John- No worries mate. I hadn't taken it that way, regardless, so what anyhow, as long as you're not selling chocolate fireguards. Some people bundle all sales in with window salesman and estate agents because they're too ignorant to realise that some people like to be involved (and make money) with their passions. Good for them I say.

I had a look at that yacht and it's not my thing. I'm more into motor yachts and cruisers as opposed to sailing yachts. I hope I have the terminology correct. If you have any motor yachts with mooring in the Southampton area please PM me. Thanks

If a boat is advertised somewhere does that generally mean that it will come with the mooring it currently occupies? Of course you have to rent the mooring but it is generally vacant for that vessel right? Is this a correct assumption?

Here is another I've found and this one is in Southampton

http://www.boatsandoutboards.co.uk/offshore-cruisers/arch-eon-of-bordeaux-67-tsdy-NAL545
 
Hi forestboy and thanks for that.

I am sail only so don't come across motor boats, but a trawler style yacht might be worth looking at.

Boats often come with a mooring contract that can be taken over.
 
That sort of boat is for those who enjoy leisure boating - but might be suitable for liveaboard. As the description implies it is a "millionaires" plaything and running costs to keep it mobile require very deep pockets. Typically that size boat will cost over £1m new, so the asking price tells you how lowly they are valued when a few years old. Bit like buying a RR Silver Shadow for £8k as a runaround!

Getting a mooring is arguably the biggest headache for a liveaboard. Most moorings are rented from a club, mooring contractor or a marina and rental terms assume they are effectively just parking spots. Some marinas and harbours will tolerate people living aboard, but for the size of vessel you are looking at you are probably restricted to industrial type harbours rather than yottie orientated marinas - not least because the latter would be hugely expensive for that size boat. There are some places where the moorings are designated as residential, mostly on rivers and canals, but inevitably demand for these far outweighs supply. So perhaps you need to explore moorings first before looking for a boat - and Southampton is not a place endowed with lots of suitable moorings!
 
OK thanks for the feedback.

I just had a look at Hamble river harbour authority price list for example and their continuous annual pontoon mooring fees are at the highest, from HP pontoon (whatever that means) £185 per meter per year. So for that 20m boat I linked to above I'd be looking at £3700 yearly. That's not bad at all even considering antifouling costs. So what's the catch. The boat is too big for a pontoon? You don't get electricity from a pontoon? They wont allow you to live aboard on the pontoon? Water depth not sufficient? What?
 
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Not suitable for liveaboard (probably not allowed either) as no direct access to the shore other than by dinghy - typically another £1k a year for a parking spot for the dinghy. No electricity. Probably long waiting list and probably won't take a boat that size. These are parking spaces for weekend yotties who arrive on a Friday night, pay the water taxi to go out to the boat, go off for weekend and park up at the end.

You need to be looking at half tide walk ashore berths or alongside in commercial type docks - not many in Southampton area. More common on the east coast and in the north.
 
For what it's worth, the guy with the disintegrating trawler spent most of his time on the ABP midriver moorings on the Itchen - these are for small ships, unused barges, etc, rather than yachts. I believe he lived there some of the time, with a RIB for commuting to and from shore and a raft that he used to transport a 1000 litre IBC for water topups - but as Tranona says this is far from ideal for long-term live aboard.

There is another small ship (the kind of thing that takes fifty seaside tourists on a day-trip) currently moored up on the outside pontoon at Kemp's. It's being converted for living aboard (or was; one of the co-owners has died and it's all got a bit complicated) and there are quite a few other inhabited boats there. So that's an option.

Dryer Brothers a little further up the river (under a bridge so no good for yachts with masts, but OK for you) has an old barge with a static caravan on top, a wooden patio at one end and a rotary washing line at the other - a more blatant liveaboard houseboat would be hard to imagine. But when my mate asked about living there, they told him it was strictly prohibited and nobody lived on any of the boats. I think his mistake was phoning them up and bluntly asking them - many places don't officially allow living on board for reasons of council tax or the terms of their lease, but are happy to turn a blind eye in practice.

Pete
 
prv said:
For what it's worth, the guy with the disintegrating trawler spent most of his time on the ABP midriver moorings on the Itchen - these are for small ships, unused barges, etc, rather than yachts. I believe he lived there some of the time, with a RIB for commuting to and from shore and a raft that he used to transport a 1000 litre IBC for water topups - but as Tranona says this is far from ideal for long-term live aboard.

There is another small ship (the kind of thing that takes fifty seaside tourists on a day-trip) currently moored up on the outside pontoon at Kemp's. It's being converted for living aboard (or was; one of the co-owners has died and it's all got a bit complicated) and there are quite a few other inhabited boats there. So that's an option.

Dryer Brothers a little further up the river (under a bridge so no good for yachts with masts, but OK for you) has an old barge with a static caravan on top, a wooden patio at one end and a rotary washing line at the other - a more blatant liveaboard houseboat would be hard to imagine. But when my mate asked about living there, they told him it was strictly prohibited and nobody lived on any of the boats. I think his mistake was phoning them up and bluntly asking them - many places don't officially allow living on board for reasons of council tax or the terms of their lease, but are happy to turn a blind eye in practice.

Pete
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Thanks for that Pete. Not ideal perhaps but I can tell you for sure I've had far worse. I quite enjoy those sort of logistical pains in the ass. Gives me something to moan about. Seriously though, interesting, I want this, I'm prepared for potential hardship. I assume he ran off of a generator.
 
Yes but then you're having to buy in lots of diesel rather than lots of water :)
Oh, and look up the cost of a watermaker...
 
Unfortunately Southampton has got to be the most expensive place in Britain to moor a boat - probably amongst the most expensive places in Europe. We have a berth in an East Coast MDL marina - costs us around £3.5k per annum - we briefly had the boat on the Hamble and would have been looking at well over £10k in an MDL marina there.

As others have said, it's hard work being a liveaboard on a trot buoy or in an anchorage - having to take all your fuel and water out in jerry cans on a dinghy. Obviously, if you are near to a marina you do have the option of taking the boat there every week to fill up your tanks, but that does push you towards having a boat that can move and being competent to move it - not your original plan of keeping it static for the first few years.

The further you move from Southampton, the cheaper it gets - you said earlier that much of your work is there - you need to be looking at the balance between the cost of owning the boat and the cost of commuting and possibly consider marina berths a bit further along the coast in either direction.
 
OK thanks guys. So filtering ****ty water is essentially a no go for a host of reasons.

@Jonic - I did have a think about barges but decided I wanted the versatility to go where I wanted.

@Maby - Commuting is a consideration if I don't have to travel too far. Sometimes I'm knackered after work as it is. I need my sleep.

I'm looking at the specs of this boat as an example and I'm a bit confused. http://houseboats.apolloduck.co.uk/feature.phtml?id=286589

Is that right that it uses 16 litres per hour? Presumably that's calculated at cruising speed right? The calculations I'm getting from those figures are astronomical. Just going round Europe would cost a fortune. Like £35,000 in diesel at a rough guess. No, yeah, no, I can't be right?

If money were no option, it is of course, but if it wasn't; what could you do with a vessel like that? It's supposedly "sea worthy". What does that mean really? Does that mean that if you tried to cross the Atlantic in it you wouldn't die for example. Or is the phrase "sea worthy" a very loose term? I ask because I'm fairly adventurous and whatever I decide to buy, I would want the least limitations financially affordable or physically practical.
 
OK I'm guessing it's not capable of braving the heavy seas judging by my rough arithmetic telling me that you'd run out of fuel after about 8 days cruising which would put you somewhere this side of the Atlantic Ocean if you fuelled in Morroco and you'd probably die out there.

Motor sailers?

I don't necessarily even want to do this, but I'd like the option available to me.
 
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