Ownership Costs - Regrets

$300,000 to own a boat for 30 months? $600 per hour of operation? $1,500 per day spent aboard?

Crazy?
Perhaps.

Do I have regrets?
None.

I have no regrets because I did three things with Someday Soon that created what I call Bankable Memories:

1. Rounded Vancouver Island
2. Toured the Bahamas and the SE Intercoastal Waterway
3. Spent a day, alone on the ocean, far offshore from Uclulet, BC, riding to a sea anchor, catching salmon. Pure, unadulterated magic.

I would have regrets had the boat sat in a slip in Bellingham and been used for occasional jaunts to the San Juans.

One might ask whether or not I could have achieved the same result with a less expensive boat or a used boat. Yes, but there was one other thing for me - owning a thing of beauty and configuring and equipping it to perform optimally for the roles I intended to use it in. When it comes to boats and airplanes that is important to me.

So the evaluation of ownership costs is a highly subjective undertaking and prospective buyers need to weigh the costs against what is meaningful to their particular values.

Ownership Costs - The Facts

This is a topic that boat manufacturers and dealers would prefer not to have discussed publicly. I still have many friends in the marine industry and I hesitate to disclose any information that financially harms them. Yet I have a responsibility to share my experience with boaters to help them make a wise decision about venturing into boating. Boating already has a reputation for being expensive (A hole in the water...) so let's get the real numbers out there and have a conversation about solutions.


I purchased Someday Soon in March for 2015 $589,895 and sold it in November of 2017 for $475,000, an ownership period of about 30 months. I also paid $51,320 in state sales tax and $47,500 in brokerage fees when I sold the boat. I estimate that I purchased about $15,000 in accessories and equipment that went to the new owner with the sale. I also spent about $8,000 having the boat inspected during the build and upon my accepting delivery. I'll call the total of these expenses my "ownership" cost and it totals $236,715.

The remaining costs I'll call "operating" costs and they are:

Insurance - 2 1/2 years @ about $1,000/year = $2,500
Home Slip - 30 months at about $500/month = $15,000
Transient Slip - FL and the Caribbean = $10,000 (roughly)
Fuel - 500 hours of operation @ about 12 G/Hr x $2.50/G = $15,000
Maintenance = I estimate this at about $14,000 (other than engine I did most maintenance myself)
Transport = I spent about $25,000 transporting the boat to Florida and back to the Pacific NW.

Total operating costs = $71,500

 That brings my total costs for Someday Soon to $318,215. I'll use $300,000 as that number certainly encompasses the error in some of my estimates and makes the math easy.

There are several ways to perceive this number:

Cost per mile
Our average speed was probably about 14 knots, so we covered around 7,000 miles in 30 months. That brings the cost per mile to $42.85

Cost per month of ownership
Easy math. It cost $10,000 per month to own Someday Soon for 30 months.

Cost per hour of operation (underway)
This is the shocker. It cost $600 per hour for each of our 500 hours underway.

Cost per day spent on the boat
Our number of days for this is probably higher than the average owner as we lived on the boat for 5 months in the SE for an estimated 150 days. In addition, I estimate we spent another 50 days total in the NW cruising the San Juans and in our trips around Vancouver Island and up the BC coast. That 200 day total brings the average day on the boat to $1,500 per day. Remember, we spent far more days on our boat than the average boater, so our cost per day is lower than it may be for others.

There are a number of conclusions one could draw fro this analysis and they fall into these categories in my opinion:

1. Accept these costs and be happy
2. Avoid owning a boat
3. If you must own, buy used (or small, or simple)
4. Charter

I'll explore each of these in a future post.