Charter Boat Ownership and the Phase Out.

[Iaangus]

Yes, I guess I was (incorrectly) considering you were in a fixed or guaranteed income. The fact that the cash flow is spelled out in advance makes it similar, but with out the hassel. It’s one I would consider. Was DYC willing to negotiate the price of the catamaran or length of commitment?

[Topspin]

I am also interested in a contract with DYC. My idea is not to do so to make money, but to get a boat for a reasonable price in a (hopefully) reasonable condition. The key point here is IMHO the phaseout.

Has anyone done a phaseout with them so far?



Regards,



-Topspin

[Nauti Cat]

I had no experience with dream yacht charters, but with another charter company. Make sure you get time limits in contract for phase out. My company agreed to get everything in working order , but there was no time limit, so they kept putting me off weeks at a time till I gave in, signed release and took boat as is.

[The Traveler]

Thanks to you all for a great thread. I'm very interested in following your experiences Blue Buddha and Village Idiot. I'm more than a decade out from doing this but am seriously looking at it for the same reasons you've chosen to do it.

I'm really interested in hearing from someone who's gone through the phase out process to see how satisfied they are with the yacht's condition. We've only chartered once so far and it was on an 8 year old (I think, maybe 10?) DYC owned catamaran in Tahiti. It was in pretty tired condition cosmetically but I was honestly impressed with the overall condition of her systems. Both motors were brand new, sails were good, all running rigging was relatively new, standing rigging looked good, and most hardware (blocks, etc) were in excellent condition. The electrical system and water system worked perfectly. This was a DYC owned boat, and had been chartered year round for 8+ years so I really wasn't surprised by the cosmetic condition.

Everyone I've spoken to that's chartered newer boats through DYC and Moorings has had positive things to say about the condition of their boats.

If money was no object then certainly I'd agree with those who couldn't imagine a bunch of random yahoos sailing their boat for 5 years but for those of us to whom money is very much a limiting factor, this might make sense. I don't have the budget to be bothered by the fact that someone else put some scratches on my boat.

Looking forward to your future posts.



Smooth sailing

[AxelCl]

Have been renting out my boat in Greece via Click&Boat, a boat hire platform in Europe. Never had any problems, very reliable, good booking requests from all over the world - I guess it helps that Greece has been increasingly popular as a boating destination over the last few years. I am not sure if it's worth buying a new boat to do that, but for those who already own one and they wanna earn extra money for a long trip or some other reason it's really a no-brainer

[Village Idiot]

Originally Posted by Village Idiot

A recent contact reminded me of this thread in which I said I would keep a track of the whole thing, financial and otherwise, so why not ?

By way of a recap, I signed up for a Lagoon 380, based in Dubrovnik, in the DYC "Dream Easy' program. We inked the deal in December 2017 for a Lagoon that had been launched in April 2017 and had already done 1 season of its 6 year term, so I was signing up for the remaining 5 years. Our boat comes out of the program in November 2022, at which point I intend to use it ourselves.

The guts of this deal is I pay 60% of the cost of the 'new' price in total, in 2 instalments - 35% up front , which I have obv already paid, and 25% in Nov 2022 when it becomes ours. In the meantime I don’t get any income, just owners weeks use up to 6 weeks per year, but I don't get any bills either. For context the initial payment was about 92k euros. My expectation is that at the end of the program it will be worth very roughly the 60% of new that we are paying for it but if it is worth something less that won’t invalidate the model.

So after a year or so in, how's it going? Pretty well really.

So far I have done two owner use charters . The first was on our 'own' yacht out of Dubrovnik , for 6 weeks in July and August 2018, and we sailed it down to Greece (as far as Kephalonia) and back. Was it awesome? Yes it bloody was. I was also really stoked with the boat, and the condition it was in, (remembering it was around 1.3 seasons old at this time). I have no complaints about the way it was being looked after, up until the time I last saw it anyway. I wrote a bit of a blog on this trip , from an owners point of view, on a website set up by a fellow DYC owner Nils, at

https://noshoes-resoled.com/submit-p...ht-in-charter/

For the record, when I left the boat it had done about 1.5 seasons out of 6, there were about 1100 hours on the engines. The sails were like new, although I think this might be peculiar to Croatia – there doesn’t seem to be much wind there , at least in summer. Overall it still presented like new, although there was minor cosmetic damage inside, eg some cuts on the benchtops, some chips to cabinetry, but not worse than I expected, and if I get away with 4 times the existing knocks by the end of it I will be quite happy.

The '6 week in a row all in high season' trip is not in the standard conditions at all - that was special deal agreed on before signing up, when I had some leverage, (I was only going to sign up if this trip was part of the deal)! To do that they allowed me to pull forward some weeks from future years, but I am ok with that as it’s from years when my son will be in his final years of high school anyway. In future years I also will be restricted to the standard contract terms, which do make it harder to utilise.

For each charter, DYC produce the same charter contract as they would for any other punter, stating the cost of the charter including any early booking or long term charter discounts , before then discounting it to nil for ‘owner use’ . The contract value of this trip before zeroing it for owner use was 33668 euros.

Even after this trip, I still had my 2 weeks ‘short notice’ weeks to use up, and I managed to squeeze in a 9 day charter on a Lagoon 400 in Thailand in December 2018 just before I lost them. The weather on this trip was perhaps a little short of what it should be in December (it was in 'high season'), but was still well worth doing. The charter invoice value of this trip was 9900 euros.

For this year , I have my 2 weeks high season booked on a Lagoon 380 out of Athens in July (8772 euros) , and am juggling a few ideas for the short notice and low season weeks. Thinking about Thailand next month. Thinking about taking pot luck on a short notice week or two somewhere in Greece in June. To be honest I am finding it a challenge using up all of my allowances, especially if you live in Perth where it is a minimum of 2 flights to get to any DYC base. And your family have other work and school commitments that restrict their time available. However it’s not a challenge I mind having. I’ll give it a good crack and if I don’t use all the weeks up so be it.

Others have said on here that it might work out if only you would have chartered for 6 weeks a year anyway, but I tend to disagree. Would I have chartered for 6 weeks a year for 5 years in a row if I hadn’t signed up for this? No I wouldn’t have, because my budget for sailing holidays doesn’t run to that much money. The result of having the 6 weeks a year on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis is actually that it will force me to go on more sailing holidays to more places than I otherwise would have, for a lot less money.

Would I have chartered for 6 weeks in Greece in 2018? Maybe, that was what started this whole thing off, but that would have been a one off.

Would I have paid 9900 euros for 9 days on a Lagoon 400 in Thailand with only my 15 yr old son and one of his mates on board? Not on your life! But for free and I’ll take it, and that’s a trip with my son I wouldn’t otherwise have had, that we’ll both remember.

I probably won’t end up using the full 6 weeks every year, but the success or otherwise of this for me doesn’t rely on using up every available week.

Since I intended to keep a financial record of the whole thing as well as the charters, total charter value of all charters booked to date ; 52340 euros.

In summary, so far this thing works for me. It might not for other circumstances, but it does for mine. And now excuse me but I’ve got to get back to planning the next trip….

Update at end 2019;

2019 was a 'normal' year in that we had the standard 2 weeks high season, 2 weeks low season, and 2 'short notice' weeks to use, and used them as follows;

2 Weeks on a Lagoon 380 out of Lavrion, Greece , early July (high season weeks)
2 Weeks on a Dufour 46 out of Athens , late June (short notice weeks used in high season)
2 Weeks on a FP Orana 44 in Turkey , last two weeks of September (low season weeks) (had to pay a bit of an upgrade on this one as they had no equivalent size to ours)

Hardly 'two weeks in October'

Total charter value this year - 22374 euros
Total charter value to date (2 years) - 65942 euros

Charter value is as invoiced by DYC before owners discount but includes any discount a punter would have got. Now I would be the first to agree that without this I wouldn't be chartering for 6 weeks a year, and if I did I would seek out something more at the value end of the range. But I gotta keep track of something.

Still happy

[Nils Gruttner]

I concur with the last post of village idiot . To date, the ability to just book a yacht for a week or two is awesome and it's something you wouldn't do if you didn't have to time "allocated" - speak lose them if you don't use them.

Booked 4 out of my 6 weeks for 2020, albeit it's much easier for me to use "last minute" 2 weeks as travel is a lot cheaper for me, and I am sure I will find time!

Will we be ahead financially at the end? Well, let's see. To date, VI number add up to be correct .