New to Yachting

[sKiBa]

Hi All,

I'm fairly new to yachting and am trying to cost out the feasibility of buying a boat and wondered if someone could answer these questions for me.

How much is it to moor a 33ft boat in a marina in the med somewhere?

How long would it take to sail that boat back to the UK for the winter? How much would it be to moor (roughly) in the UK?

What kind of annual costs are incurred outside of mooring when owning a boat?

Would be great to know the answer to these, I can't find anything about them on the net!

Thanks,

Mike

 

[Tranona]

Welcome to the forum!

The world is awash with the information you need. Only todayYachting Monthly arrived with a long article on costs of living on a boat in the Med.

The Med is a huge place and prices and facilities vary emormously from high prices in the popular Spanish and French areas to next to nothing in the more remote areas of the Eastern Med. The only constant is that prices are rising rapidly because of growing overcrowding and weak currency.

To give you an idea, my budget for this year to keep a 37 in Corfu including mooring fees, maintenance, insurance, and gardinage is about 8000 Euros. This could be reduced by 2-3000 by mooring in less popular places and by a similar amount by keeping on the move and laying up in one of the small yards.

As to sailing back to the UK, this is not feasible except as a one off at the beginning or end of a project. Many people buy a boat here and sail it to the Med either round the outside or through the canals, and a few (like me) intend to do it the other way round. However, unless on a strictly delivery trip the passage takes most of s season if you want to enjoy it.

Hope this helps you get going.

 

[benlui]

Well.... I expect there will be much response to this post.
Welcome to the forum skiba.
I hope you find this place useful. I’m new enough to sailing also and I bough my boat 2 years ago now almost.
If i had have only come on here before i bought, how different things would be for me.

With regards costs, I am no help to you as my boat is in Ireland. But, i expect you will get lots of info here on this post.
In my experience so far, i guess you would need to set aside 15-25% of the boats value for all the associated costs. That’s a very general assumption, but i find it to be correct for me. Dough, in saying that, i have my boat in the water 10 months of the year. Marina for winter, and mooring for summer.
Good luck with it, you are going to need it and rest assured it will all be worth it...........

 

[sKiBa]

Thanks for the info gents, i'm trying to weigh up the pros and cons of owning vs renting and seeing how much usage I could get (hence considering the winter months in the UK which appears unfeasible). I've seen some fairly decent deals to rent for 1-2 weeks for probably a small percentage of the cost of owning/mooring a boat for a year. As i'm not in position to use it more than a few weeks and weekends a year I am leaning towards this method now but will buy this months Yachting Monthly and have a read.

 

[Tranona]

You might consider going the route we went which is to buy a boat through a charter management deal. You own the boat and have use for anything up to 6 weeks a year with the charter operator picking up all the costs and the revenue from chartering. At the end of the contract, usually 6 seasons you take over the boat. There are many different variations on this theme, but if you are expecting to use the boat more than 2/3 weeks a year it can be cheaper than chartering. Downside is the capital outlay and having to keep or dispose of the boat at the end.

Suggest you talk to Chris Hawes of Yacht Fractions www.yachtfractions.co.uk who is very experienced in putting together deals.

 

[benlui]

Also perhaps you should consider a shared owner scheme? At least you would split the costs with lets say 4-5 other people giving you the use you require.

 

[Searush]

Costs of ownership:
Depreciation; generally low, sometimes a gain if you buy a popular used model. High if you buy new.

Interest: Consider the cost of any loan required, plus the interest lost on any capital invested.

Maintenace; marina/ mooring charge, winter storage, crane in/out, allow a percentage for repairs/ kit replacement depending on age & condition of boat

Also consider the cost of travelling to your boat whether bought of chartered.

 

[blackbeard]

Hi sKiBa
Welcome to the forum from me, another Mike.
Now, this may come as a surprise. But, if you want as much sailing as possible with as much interest and variety as possible, don't buy a boat. Not to begin with, anyway.

You will get more sailing, and learn more, as crew for someone else, or as a member of a club that operates a boat, and you will also save a great deal of money!

You don't say exactly what you want the boat for. You should give this some thought because it's impossible to answer your questions without some idea of what you have in mind. Do bear in mind though that your ideas of want you want to do are likely to change as soon as you gain a little experience - another reason for not buying a boat at this stage.

The reason why you can't find costs on the Net is that the answer will depend on exactly what it is that you want to do.

And finally. Yachting, like any other sport or lifestyle, is the very stuff dreams are made on. Thus it is that harbours and marinas are full of boats that never get used. You can see this for yourself - look around any marina on a sunny week-end and see all that boats that are not being used. Some don't move from one month to the next - hardly get used all season. They belong, in the main, to people who dreamed of going sailing but somehow failed to check the dream against experience. Please don't become one of them.

 

[John100156]

I'm currently aboard my 34ft boat in the Med. MDL's new marina. I budget around £10k per year to include marina costs, insurance and general maintenance.

Ryanair flights are cheap at the moment to Reus. My boat has actually cost me less in the Med this year than it did in Torquay last year, and here I can pick the day to go out, unlike last year! (Although they do say UK should have a better summer this year. And if I'm honest I do miss trips up the Dart!)

SWMBO and me had lunch at anchor in the lagoon last week with temps close to 80f.

Currently its cheap to berth here at Sant Carles, I would budget around £4k for berthing and services, Torquay budget around £5.5k.

To have your boat moved here by lorry will cost you around £5k. Boat insurance will cost you around £750.

Of course, much of the above will depend on the age and condition of your boat.

Hope above helps, others will no doubt furnish you with different opinions, one of the benefits of this forum is that lots of people are very generous with their comments, so consider them all, even the contentious ones! /forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif

 

[maxcampbell]

Before reading on, let me declare an interest - I sell kits for trailer-sailers. But, have you considered a 24'-ish trailer-sailer? No mooring fees - a couple of days to get from med to UK & same back. Our 24 footer (and others, I guess) gives up to 4 berths, seperate heads, self-bailing cockpit, inboard or outboard aux. Within one area (say UK) you can visit a variety of cruising grounds.