Billionaires
They’re not that expensive, at least not up-front. A guy I know bought a sailboat for a few thousand dollars, but the catch was that it was almost 50 years old and needed a lot of repairs. He saved money by doing the repairs himself, but the $400 per month slip fee was still too much for him eventually and he sold the boat.
You got the right idea I think. The boats are all smooshed together in a Marina so it’s natural for people to overestimate the number of boats relative to the number of people. There are way way way more people then there are boats. Honestly that’s the appeal of boats, the ability to go somewhere there aren’t a lot of people because most people don’t own boats.
Ah you are on to John Boatman I see…
A city of 250,000 people could have 250 boats (that’s enough for a marina or two) and it would be 0.01% of the population (the one percent of the one percent). That seems to not really be that crazy.
And if you consider that a small percentage of the boat population may have 2 or even 3 boats, than it gets even less weird.
I also think that if you live near water, people are generally at least a little more likely to get a boat instead of a nice car or bigger house or other luxury item.
Edit: I was off by an order of magnitude so it would be 0.1% not 0.01, however, I think the broader point is still valid.
You’re also forgetting all the people who live on a boat instead of buying or renting property. I live in a coastal state, and some marinas work like trailer parks, where you pay the moorage fee and they supply water/sewer/electric to your boat.
But 0.01% of 250,000 is 25.
(Sorry 🙁)
Yea that’s my mistake, but even scaled up an order of magnitude I think it still works. That’s still 1 in 10 one percenters.
boats aren’t expensive, especially the older they are. fixing boats properly is expensive, but you also don’t really need to do that. My dad had a racing boat when I was a kid, it cost him $400… I bought a dinghy last year for $200. That’s less than the cost of a game console. And it costs literally nothing to go take it out on the water.
My mom grew up in the '40s and '50s and she told me many times about the surplus PT boat her dad had bought at the end of WWII which the family would take out for boating trips. I was like holy shit a PT (Patrol Torpedo) boat! These things had three Packard engines and could make 45 knots. Later on as an adult I discovered that it was actually just a pontoon boat, one of the things the army would use to make temporary bridges over rivers and that could only go about 3 mph. My mom had just thought “PT” stood for “Pon Toon” so that’s what she called it. It turns out she had always wondered what the hell John F. Kennedy had been doing in the Pacific fighting the Japanese in a pontoon boat.
Later on, I then learned that my mom’s uncle had actually bought a surplus Air/Sea Rescue boat after the war. This boat was basically a PT boat, just with two of the Packard engines instead of three; since it was 15 feet longer than a PT boat it could also do 45 knots. So it turns out my mom did have this childhood experience of rocketing around the ocean at unbelievable speeds. Her uncle ended up selling the boat after the engine room caught fire for the third time (something these engines were notorious for) and we have no idea what happened to it after that. These boats cost about $190K new and he had somehow acquired it for $10K - I expect there was some shady dealing going on there.
It’s like when you drive through an area that’s all McMansions you’re like “how they hell are there this many people with enough money and poor enough taste to own all these McMansions”? I guess the thing is that money people property sprawls out, whereas most of us live in a container city down a hole clustered around a sewer outlet so thousands don’t take up that much space.
I have the same experience driving around the Philly suburbs (mostly west and southwest of the city proper). Like, what the fuck do all these people do that they can afford these places?
middle management or sales
Same people who own all the empty properties, residential and commercial; Fucking leaches, that’s who.
Eh, as someone who knows a boat person its like only half that, the other half really, really like boats.
You’re talking boat-people. The topic is Dock Queens; The vast majority of the boats in most marinas, which never leave the dock.
I’m a boat lover and a (thankfully)former landlord. I seent it.
Who owns the lake?
everywhere I go in the world there are giant marinas with a million boats
I’ve told you a MILLION times to NOT EXAGGERATE!
And how do you get to go everywhere in the world, that marinas stand front and center of your attention? Could it be that you go… on your boat?
“I swear to God it smells like shit everywhere I go!”
They aren’t as expensive as you think especially the shitty sailboats
This boat made me fixated on the idea of buying a boat and living in it.
While the buying part is plausible.
The living is a lot fucking harder.
You have to really like being on the water. It’s just as hard as living in an RV off grid.
It’s probably a bit easier to live in a boat, since it’s common (and I guess legal) for marinas to allow people to live in their boats while docked there. I own a skoolie (used school bus converted into a motorhome) and it is nearly fucking impossible to find anywhere that I could legally live in it - especially anywhere near big cities. Ironically, I’ve even tried contacting marinas to see if I could live there in my skoolie and they’re all like “hell no you fucking hippie”. I wonder if I could buy a barge, park the bus on it, and then live in a marina.
That would be hilarious. But are you over the size limit for national parks? Because that was always my RV life plan. Just getting national park and BLM spots.
My dad used to own a sailboat, which was a high point for someone squarely middle class. We’re talking a 44 ft sailboat.
These things are holes in the water who the fuck wants a boat
I used to dream of living on a sailboat. Then a friend of mine who owned one took me out for a ride and I was so seasick I had to jump into the water and be towed back to the dock. So much for that shit.
the upkeep alone - painting scraping replacing the anode every fuckin year… it’s a fuckton of work for a ‘fun hobby’
At the height of being poor in like '83 or so (mortgage rates to 17%; just ponder that) we panick-moved to a smaller town with a union job but found a fixer house with an attached shop.
Dad, ever the salesman and skilled labourer, would do work for people in exchange for wood-working tools: Old window Jenkins would part with Lester’s Table Saw if Dad re-tiled the shower.
So we got tools. And he traded for plywood and plans. And suddenly we had a dory he could fit on top of this '75 econoline150 van. And fishing was great. But it was a lot of rowing this pig of a boat.
So he modded it with a dagger-board and a mast port. Took him 5 min to rig it and he was set for fishing.
Those summers camping because we couldn’t afford to do anything else but at least gas was cheap, they were awesome.
I think these people just have shiny boats, which are too expensive. If you want to find them, they’re finishing the Penske file so they can still afford exorbitant Slip fees and dream of Taking the Boat Out with the estranged family members who will then love Dad again and make up for all this toil. Dude needs a cheap ugly van and a wallowing pig of a dory to ‘sail’ around a lake in the woods; aim smaller and actually go make memories.
At the height of being poor in like '83 or so (mortgage rates to 17%; just ponder that)
FWIW A mortgage payment at 17% interest on the $20,000 my parents paid for my childhood three bedder in 1980 was cheaper than a single mortgage payment i make today.
How do you make a small fortune?
Start with a large fortune and buy a boat.
I used to work at a fish market, and one of the fishermen we dealt with once won a large sum of money from a big fishing tournament. When they asked him what he was gonna do with the money, his response was, “Keep fishing until it’s all gone.”
Bust
Out
Another
Thousand
As the saying goes:
The two best days of a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat, and the day they sell the boat
Meh, a boat is a hole in the water to dump money into, a car is a hole in the road, and a house is a hole in the ground. At least the boat combines the advantages of the other two.
Bring Out Another Thousand
There are a lot of people in the world. Like a loooooot. Even if the % of non normies is only like 0.01% of the population that would easily explain those boats.
If there was a plague that had a 100% human infection rate and killed 87% of the people infected it would still only set back world populations to around the start of the 1900s
True. The start of the 1900s was no time for messin’ around and making babies. We had to go work in the mines
This is the real answer and the reason online bubbles are so sad.
There’s so many different way to live your life and we are atrofied around a couple of equally bad options.
Sailboats aren’t prohibitively expensive for a normie, especially if you buy a used one. If you look at the large empty houses near every harbor though, you’ll see a better sign of the wealth disparity. The rich own multiple houses worth millions each and they seem to be rarely used while many people can’t afford a starter home now.
Buying a boat is cheap, owning one not so much. Between marina fees and maintenance it adds up really fast.
As my dad would say, “A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.” Boats are cool and fun if you like to sail, but between maintenance costs, mooring fees, the cost to take it out of the water and store it at a boat yard once the season is over, scrape the barnacles off, repaint it, etc. it’s not a cheap endeavor.
That’s why the only reasonable way to own a boat you can’t trailer is to live on it full-time.
I have a friend who grew up on the coast and her family always sailed for fun.
When she got divorced she bought a sailboat and traveled for a bit in it. She then parked it at a marina and lived in it for so many years close to her kids and grandkids. She paid $100K for boat and her marina fees were $300/month. The boat was paid off with the divorce settlement.
The cheapest 1 bedroom apartment to rent nearby was $3500/month for less square footage than her boat. The cheapest small house was around $1,000,000 or around $6000/ month at the time. The homes around the marina were all priced at several million dollars.
We met someone like that and they were considered homeless by the city, lol. I think they were annoyed at that.
Seattle is full of people that live on boat as an affordable alternative. You can’t be squeamish about insects or get seasick easily because of the storms. I couldn’t do it myself, but I’ve known quite a few that have.
What kinda insects we talking about here?
Water spiders, gnats, etc. You know, bugs you see in a boathouse or in the bathrooms around water.
We don’t really have gnats here in Seattle. It’s great.
So we only get water spiders and etc.?
I’ve never seen those here, either. And they don’t sound like much of a pest since they wouldn’t be flying around biting you.
Why would you assume that I spend time on boathouses or aquatic bathrooms?
You’re in a thread asking about boat related stuff
Yeah, asking questions about boats.
You haven’t asked a single question about boats, only about insects.
Lol, I assume everyone has been camping near a lake or something. That’s what I meant by bathrooms on water. If you have ever been by a pier, look underneath, that’s a good tell as well.
A Space Noodle is a relative of a Pool Noodle, is it not?
Totally different.
Eh, water navy, space navy, close enough; I could see how some would get confused
me writing “the ocean :)” as my permanent address on government documents
This is the right answer. It’s an RV on water but it doesn’t disintegrate (working as intended, that) like an RV or fifth wheel.
What’s a fifth wheel, in this context?
Large trailer camper that is pulled by a ‘5th wheel’ hitch, like the ones found on semi trucks or heavy duty pickups.
Travel trailer.
