Family of 9 Wanting to Cruise

[JPA Cate]

Originally Posted by Barbar0ssa

Thanks everyone for the feedback! I really appreciate the help. I'm obviously so new that I don't know what I don't know but your feedback has left me with a few questions.

1. Are bow berths potentially dangerous?sea berths (berths slept in under way) should have lee boards or lee cloths to keep the ocuppant in, safe, if the boat takes a sudden lurch, which is a common event.

2. How new must a boat be to get financing? Would a boat coming out of charter be financeable? I guess I should call a financing company.
Yes, check it out for yourself. Something else is the question of whether they would permit their boat to go offshore without being completely paid for.

3. It seems like any boat you buy, no matter the condition or price, requires a large amount of work to be ready to go. I was thinking more like real estate where you could buy a fixer-upper or you could buy a house ready to go. Am I understanding this correctly? It is not like land real estate, boat fixer-uppers are hideously expensive to fix up, expensive, and also time consuming, but of skills you'll have to teach yourself, which will take time away from your programming. Mainly, we think of 3 main areas of the boat: mast & rigging; sails (for a 50 footer, for decent sails, a suit will run you between $20K and 30K, more, if you want more specialist sails); engine & running gear.
If you buy wisely, only one of those three will need your attention. After that, there is the issue of "upgrades." As a cruiser for over 30 yrs, I've had the experience of Jim navigating by sextant--a skill I did not pick up, gone to Hawaii and back from San Francisco on a 30 footer, which few on CF would recommend; and have friends who circumnavigated with a depth sounder and VHF as their only electronics; therefore, I know we don't need all the wonderful electronic equipment that most people want to have. But that comes under "updates" or "upgrades", and it is a very individual choice. At the very least, you will probably want a GPS, and perhaps, even paper charts.

4. Can you set up long charters? From what I've seen, my $20k will cover maybe a month of chartering. Sorry, I am not acquainted with the charter market.

You know, if you are located somewhere there is a large marina, it might be informative for you to go and look at the larger boats, get a broker to show you around the ones for sale. If the sailing is the dream for you, and it excludes regular maintenance costs, consider what a skipper of a wealthy man's yacht once said to us: "It costs 10% of the cost of building the boat, per year, to take care of it." It was a $5,000,000 boat. Keeping boats is an expense, and the larger the boat, the more complex the systems, and the more everything costs. This is just how it is. Most early cruisers tend to spend at least some time in marinas; it takes a special situation not to.

If you're interested, you might have a look at sailorboy1's CF threads about his costs. He's been cruising around 7 months, now.

Ann

[TJ D]

I'll dip a toe in here.

First, I also think that you are probably woefully short on finances to accomplish this. Save some more money, absolutely.
Granted, we live probably better than most on our boat-I am employed and cruise about 1/2 the year-, and we spend more than you're budgeting. When we go to the tropics, we'll have some months where we spend under $1000 per month, but it's WAY more than that on the average, when all things are totaled up.

There are some good threads about costs for cruising. Look them up. Chuckr has great info, and sailorboy also has current info.

These folks are spending more than you're anticipating for just TWO people. And, they're on smaller boats than you're looking at.

Even if you decided to live a monastic life of poverty, you're probably short on your budget, and there will be nothing left for boat maintenance, of which there will be plenty, I assure you.


Now, the good news. You can probably-depending entirely on you- do this. My first offshore sailing was with my dad in the late 80's. We didn't know squat, bought a crappy Taiwanese boat in Ft. Lauderdale, and managed to learn it all along the way, and I can honestly say that that 18 months with my old man sailing around the Caribbean was one of the most important formative experiences for me, and it established a life-long bond between us that would simply have not occurred had we stayed ashore.

If there were such a thing as the internet back then, I shudder to think about how we would have been excoriated on Cruisers Forum for our plan. We would have been told 6 ways to Sunday how we were fools, not ready, and sure to die.

Well, we had our bumps along the learning curve, but we did perfectly fine.

Your situation is not directly analogous, but this can be done if you have the right mindset. I think that key will be to get the older kids to take as much responsibility as possible for the smaller ones.

We recently encountered a family of 5 while we were in St. John's Newfoundland. We were leaving for a transatlantic, and they were just returning from a cruise of Greenland-the kids were aged 2-6 or so. That's way tougher than the Caribbean, and they seemed to be perfectly content with their choice. Of course, they were very experienced, but still, it's illustrative of what can be done.

So, make sure you're not condemning yourself and your family to a miserable time in poverty on a boat on its way to becoming a derelict, and you will with some luck and a lot of learning be fine. Or not. It's up to you.

By the way, we have found that kids on cruising sailboats are in so many ways superior to their land-based counterparts. You would be doing these kids a huge service in expanding their world view, provided you do it in a responsible way.

Good luck to you.

TJ

[Snowpetrel]

I did a fair bit of growing up on a 45 foot gaff ketch with four brothers. It was a great time, not much space but we all fit in. Us older kids helped keep an eye on the little ones. But by then we were all pretty decent sailors, with all us older kids having raced dinghies, and the gaffer around the cans a fair bit, and my folks also grew up sailing so there was no real issue around managing the boat in our case.
http://www.nzmaid.com/?page_id=29

I guess the first thing for you is to learn to sail well, and teach your family (and wife) to sail and enjoy it. You would want to get an offshore voyage as crew under your belt at least before you take your family to sea.

Something like a PDR racer or three would make a great starting point. Build them cheap, with polytarp sails. http://www.pdracer.com

Yes it is a box, but anyone can build a box, boxes are easy, even for 7 year old kids and the things can sail pretty well, or at least well enough to leanr to sail. After an optimist is just a slightly curvy box.

Then drop a few milk bottle and brick bouys in a pond somewhere and race around them for a bit. When all the older kids get faster than you, get them doing tricks like sailing backwards round the pond, then capsize drills and fun race of tack, gybe and capsize, where you have to all do the manouver (tack gybe or capsize) called out by the last boat. Once they become competent at that they can go on bigger patches of water and start exploring on their own. Prehaps even camping overnight.
Heres a few ideas from the PDR site.
http://www.pdracer.com/sailboat-games/
We did a few weeks holiday camp cruising our dinghys, loading the opti, the p classes and my grandparents 16 foot open boat up with camping gear and spending a week or two on a remote NZ lake camping and sailing. Great fun, and good seamanship training for us.
http://www.nzmaid.com/?page_id=35

So by the time we shifted onboard the boat full time we all were into the lifestyle. Unfortunately we didn't have the funds at that time to get out of NZ, so we kicked around in the beautiful cruising areas of central NZ, around cook strait and Nelson.

Issues we had at times with five hungry boys onboard was making enough bread or alternatives for lunches, and fitting us all into some kind of dingy. We ended up building a big 12 foot hard dinghy as well as the little 8 footer. In your case you would probably need a big inflatable, and a few smaller boats and then some way to stow them on deck or on davits for longer hops where towing stuff is not smart. You would almost certainly want another solid crew member on any longer offshore trips. We often had someone extra onboard and when the SHTF it payed off.

Its worth watching the movie Captain Fantastic if you haven't already...

[Steadman Uhlich]

I think the idea of starting with:

1. RV so you can do some "land yachting" and get used to tiny spaces with all the kids

2. Build (some) Puddle Duck Racer boats so the kids can get involved in building and sailing. I think TWO of them would be very cool and since they only weigh about 150 pounds, you could carry two (or more) on a trailer behind the RV.

I am glad SNOWPETREL brought up the PDR. Great suggestion!

Here is some text from the PDR site that makes a good point about this design:

NOTE: this is a VERY low cost boat to build and VERY easy design and the plans are FREE.

"The PDRacer is a developmental one design racing sailboat that is basically a plywood box with a curved bottom and is the easiest boat in the world to build. The rules are aimed at keeping the lower 10" of all hulls the same but the rest is up to the builder. A simple hull can be made from 3 sheets of plywood, titebond II glue and latex house paint. If you work hard for 2 weekends you can go sailing on the 3rd weekend. If you are really in a hurry it is possible to go from lumber to the lake in 5 days.

Our boat is not just for racing, she is great for all sorts of other purposes and in most states a boat this small does not need to be titled or registered. The hull shape carries 630 lbs. One member took 2 adults and 3 kids for an afternoon sail. "

Also, somewhere on the PDR site there is a video that shows KIDS building their own boat. They did it quickly too. I was impressed and thought it was an excellent example of how kids can be involved.

The reason I suggest TWO of these for your family, is to minimize the fight for who gets to sail together and to maximize the fun. TWO boats allows some competition…and that is guaranteed to make it even more fun.

[savoir]

Originally Posted by Kenomac

But this fellow just told us he makes $60k per year. I can't even see how it's possible to feed, clothe, educate, take care of healthcare needs, transportation, utilities and put a roof over the heads of nine people on only $60k per year in the US... let alone purchase a fifty foot sailboat (financed) and take six months off.

Sorry, but it's not possible.

Well he certainly couldn't follow Mr Zatara's generous spending habits. On the other hand the guy does accept that he'll be broke at the end of the 6 months. Not getting work at that time could make life a little exciting.

[Barbar0ssa]

Originally Posted by Steady Hand

I think the idea of starting with:

1. RV so you can do some "land yachting" and get used to tiny spaces with all the kids

2. Build (some) Puddle Duck Racer boats so the kids can get involved in building and sailing. I think TWO of them would be very cool and since they only weigh about 150 pounds, you could carry two (or more) on a trailer behind the RV.

...

The reason I suggest TWO of these for your family, is to minimize the fight for who gets to sail together and to maximize the fun. TWO boats allows some competition…and that is guaranteed to make it even more fun.

This sounds really good to me. Our last project was a school bus motor home conversion and we'll be learning an awful lot with the adventures we have land yachting.

[Octopus]

In 2007, we bought a cat and sailed across the Atlantic to the Caribbean with our six small children, spent six months sailing in the Caribbean and then sailed back across the Atlantic to Scotland. We are not wealthy, but we achieved all this in perfect safety and comfort.

Like the OP, I work in IT. Likewise, we had no savings. We financed our ten month sabbatical by borrowing money against the value of our home, which fortunately had increased in value significantly in the ten years we had owned it. I doubt it is possible to borrow money against the value of an old boat.

We had a flexible mortgage that acted like a bank account, which meant that our borrowing increased in-line with our expenditure during the sabbatical and we only paid interest on the money we were borrowing. We could have rented out the house while we were away, to offset our expenditure, but we decided we could just about afford not to.

Life afloat was a little less expensive than life on land. We spent about four weeks in marinas, and were anchored or sailing the rest of the time. The two big costs were my loss of earnings and the boat, which we planned to sell afterwards.

We bought a brand new Lagoon 420 Hybrid with four double cabins. We originally planned to get a pre-owned cat, but the early adopter discount that Lagoon offered for the Hybrid just brought it within our price range (200k GBP). I don't think we could have made a better choice. The plan was to sell it at the end of our trip. Sensible plan, but we didn't have the will power to carry it out.

My wife and I had each sailed about 600 miles on small monohulls before we were married and literally hadn't stepped on a boat for ten years before we took delivery of our new cat, Octopus. Three weeks later we set out on our sailing sabbatical. If you are both intelligent, practical and resourceful and you work well together then you can learn it all as you go. Cruising cats are very easy to sail and very forgiving.

We took on unpaid crew for the two Atlantic passages. There was plenty of room on our 42 footer even when we had five adults and six children aboard. The kids didn't mind sleeping on floors. For a family of nine, I don't think you would want to go smaller than a 38 footer. I cannot speak too highly of our Lagoon 420 in terms of accommodation and comfort. It was perfect.

Our children were aged 6 to 12 for our trip, which was perfect as they were all old enough to participate and remember it, without teenage hormones flying around. Younger than that will be fine on a cat, but you will need to keep a close eye on toddlers. We tried sailing on a mono with small children aged 1 and 2 when we were first married - it was a nightmare.

Your plan of returning to work periodically to finance your cruising might work, but I tried something similar and it didn't. In 2010, two years after returning from our sabbatical, we sailed down to the Mediterranean. For a month or two I left the family in Southern Spain and I flew home to the UK for the working week. Strangely, my wife didn't enjoy being left alone to manage six kids in a strange anchorage for five days. Fine if you can moor your boat near where you work, but in my experience that's generally not possible.

I recommend you buy a 40 foot+ four cabin ex-charter cat. Don't worry about it being a bit beaten up, as fixing it up will teach you how it all works and help you maintain it in the future.

[Barbar0ssa]

Octopus, thanks for the great reply! It's awesome hearing from someone who has actually accomplished it!

What were the problems you ran into with small children on a monohull?

Do you have a blog?

How did you pull off a new Catamaran for $260,000?!? Every price I've seen so far has been north of $400K. Am I missing something basic or has the pricing changed that drastically?

[Octopus]

Originally Posted by Barbar0ssa

What were the problems you ran into with small children on a monohull?

It's a long time ago now, but I still remember how stressful it was for all of us. Everything is more frenetic on a monohull, which together with the sudden lurches and unnatural angle of heel seemed to unnerve our two toddlers. They had to be strapped into car seats all the time we were sailing, which they hated. Everything is more difficult when you are heeling particularly looking after small children when you need to need at least three hands at the best of times. I never figured out how you were meant to have three hands for the child and another one for the boat. No doubt there are people that have happily completed a circumnavigation in a monohull with toddlers, but perhaps they've got more hands than other people.

Originally Posted by Barbar0ssa

How did you pull off a new Catamaran for $260,000?!? Every price I've seen so far has been north of $400K. Am I missing something basic or has the pricing changed that drastically?

Exchange rates were favourable at the time and the Lagoon 420 was the first ever production cruising cat with a hybrid propulsion system and they were selling it without having built any, so they were offering big discounts to induce early customers. We drove a hard bargain and got a good deal. Also, we were able to reclaim the tax, provided we left the EU VAT area within 60 days.

Originally Posted by Barbar0ssa

Do you have a blog?

We do, but took the site down a few years ago. I'll see if we can bring it back up.

One cautionary tale about toddlers on a boat:
Beth and I were with my brother and his wife in the cockpit of their cat anchored in Chaguaramas Bay, Trinidad, with four small children aboard. I heard a plop and assumed it was the dinghy lapping on the painter and ignored it. Beth heard the same sound, but fortunately her maternal instinct kicked in and did a quick head count. My nephew aged two had slipped past us whilst we were talking and had fallen overboard. He would undoubtedly have drowned if Beth hadn't responded as she did.

Chris

[Reileyvl]

Sounds like a lot of gloom and doom advice. I had 9 kids and did a lot of weekend sailing on a Catalina 36. It was an older boat that needed some love, but was a great experience! Yes, my bank did finance it-$30k. Yes, maintenance was a surprise when everything labeled "boat" part was more than other like items, but we loved the life. We docked it in a county slip in Charleston and sailed locally- that's what I would really recommend, start smaller and go local. As you learn more, you will likely either fall in love with the lifestyle, or be ready to abandon ship with a lot less invested.

We are currently land locked in Utah saving for the next big adventure in the Caribbean, but with only 4 at home now (mission, college, married, etc)

Do what you can, reasearch like you are doing now, pray a lot, and the Lord will do the rest! The adventure only gets as big as your imagination!

[Barbar0ssa]

We spent a week at the NC Outer Banks and took the whole family for a daysail in the Roanoke Sound. I was told that there is only one boat in the state that can sail with more than 6 passengers, but we managed to get on it!

Everyone loved it. I think we are looking for the next incremental step in the journey.

[Don C L]

"You're gonna need a bigger boat"
I always liked that quote from Jaws.
I think you just said it correctly, incremental steps. I was not thinking so much about costs or boat size, but with 9 different personalities, is this everyone's dream? If so I think you will all make it work. If not, it will be more difficult and there will need to be compromises. And people with boat dreams don't usually like compromises. I wish you the best in your adventures.

[sailingunity]

My wife and I were in your shoes, albeit with 3 kids and a fair bit more savings. I'll approach this strictly from an experience point of view than a money point of view.

When we got the bug we got it hard and wanted to take off right away. I'd grown up around boats, mostly weekend trips, but had never owned one. So we bought the boat, sold everything, quit the job and left. We were inspired by so many sailing families before us. We lived aboard for 7 months travelling the east coast and Bahamas before moving back to land, getting the job again, and re-entering the rat race. Our youngest was a big reason (1 year old), as she was entering that phase where she could walk/climb but not obey any commands. We also knew we'd be having another baby, thus starting the process over. Before we started some told us the same thing they are telling you - buy a smaller boat and get used to it. We probably should have done this, but have no regrets about the way we did it. It was the best 7 months of our life, we are keeping the boat and are planning to cruise again one day.

Our boat is an Olympic Adventure 47, with 5 berths - 2 of those being pilot berths. She's also available with bunks in the midship cabin which would make it 6. You could sleep 3 kids in the aft cabin due to the U-shaped bed. You might also look at the Dufour 12000CT.

That being said, after we set off we saw so many families doing it on much smaller boats. I think they just get used to the smaller spaces. Kids can sleep on settees, double up, etc.

[Barbar0ssa]

I took 3 of my 7 kids on a whirlwind visit to the Annapolis Sailboat Show yesterday. We toured many boats and it was quite an experience! I have a much better feel for what could work for us and what won't.

I made another thread to compare two boats that are more interesting to me after the show.

[Octopus]

There are many cautionary words from wise heads on this thread, but although well-intentioned they are all wrong. Cruising for six months or a year with a family of seven kids can be done and it should be done if it is humanly possible.

Originally Posted by Kenomac

You're going to end up with people on this forum recommending you "go for it," but you need to be realistic. Most of them just want to see the train wreck at the end of the movie.

That is just so not true. What we want is to see is nine people benefit from the experience of a lifetime. In these terms, a sailing sabbatical for a large family represents extraordinary value for money on a per head basis.

So, it's all about making the money work.

Say you manage to borrow $250k, perhaps secured against the value of your home. You then buy a boat for $200k, leaving you with $50k contingency money. You could reasonably expect to sell the boat at the end of your trip and only suffer depreciation of, say, 5% ($10k) and selling costs of $5k (we are being optimistic here). Loan interest might cost you, say, 5% ($12.5k). A frugal and resourceful family of nine can easily live on-the-hook in the Caribbean for less than $1k per month, so costing you $12k over the year.

Allowing $5.5k for unforeseen expenses, this gives a total cost of $45k for the year. Or, looked at another way $5k per person for a year in paradise and an experience of a lifetime that will give you all maturity, resourcefulness and courage beyond your years and help form your characters for the rest of your lives. What else could possibly give you that sort of value for money?

I can say all this because we did exactly what I describe above with a family of eight in 2007 for much the same money that I state, except our costs were in GBP and currency values fluctuate.

Like the OP, I am in IT and am reasonably well paid. In essence our ten month sabbatical cost us one year of my pay before tax (in addition to the ten month's pay I lost through not being at work). Who wouldn't give a year's pay for this kind of experience?

The trick is to borrow the money cheaply, buy an easily resalable boat promptly, commence the sabbatical immediately, live cheaply, complete the sabbatical on plan at the intended location, sell the boat expeditiously and return to gainful employment swiftly. And be lucky!

We managed all the above, except selling the boat, which we still have ten years later.

Originally Posted by Kenomac

What about healthcare costs?

Comments like this (no disrespect intended, Kenomac) show the gulf in understanding between those of us with large families and those without. Healthcare costs, like a host of other expenses that others take for granted, don't enter into it. You live frugally, take calculated risks and make the best of any sh!t that happens. Quite apart from anything, a year spent cruising in the Caribbean must represent one of the healthiest life choices available, so the risk of health issues for a happy family are minimal.

"go for it"

Chris