Some sailors need a house just as much as they need a boat
Issue 34: Jan/Feb 2004
OVER TIME I HAVE COME TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE MOST CRITICAL item of cruising equipment for us is a house. “E-e-e-k!” says the critic. “Heresy again. It’s common knowledge that every cruising dream starts with selling one’s home. This is, in fact, how one raises the money for the 40-footer to go cruising in. Only the very, very wealthy can afford a boat big enough to live aboard and go cruising in and have a home ashore as well.”
That is the standard dream. It’s favored and promoted by those who need to sell 40-footers and, in all fairness, by some of those who have 40-footers.
Chris White, who designs fine multihulls, once told me he’d designed a boat for a client who sold his home and moved most of his belongings aboard. He said the boat kept sinking lower and lower in the water until it was just an overloaded barge instead of the fast cruiser it was intended to be.
The lesson here is that we are not fish. We are creatures of the land. Our boats are made from bits and pieces of the land, and they have a critical, unavoidable need to be supplied and maintained from the land. No vessel made by mankind is independent and self-sufficient at sea indefinitely. The tools, spares, and consumables needed to operate any small pleasure craft over its natural service life would sink it if they were brought aboard on commissioning day. So would the possessions found in most shoreside homes.
My house serves my boat in a critical way. The radial arm saw, drill press, shaper, band saw, jig saw, and several hundred pounds of smaller power and hand tools are in the shop and garage at home, thus sparing the boat a load that would exceed her capacity. The boat makes brief sorties out onto the water without these, but in the end they are necessary to support a 28-year-old boat. You either own at least some of these things, or you hire somebody who does.
Because this stuff is not aboard our boat, Karen and I can cruise for many weeks without resupply. Because our boat is an old 30-footer instead of a new 40-footer, we had it paid off 5 months after we bought it, and we didn’t sell our house to do it. Are we living aboard? In one sense at times we are, and in another sense we are not. We could go out for a month or a bit more at a time without resupply and live on the boat. We routinely live on the boat for 2 or 3 weeks at a time. Our boat is a small coastal cruiser, not intended for crossing oceans, but it gets around on Lake Superior, which is, for those persons not familiar with it, about twice the size of Denmark. There is plenty of room to cruise.
There are many sailors who have only their boat. As I said, that is the standard dream. They manage without the heavy equipment. They take on their supplies at each port call. They carry a few tools and spares, and they manage because they are skilled and resourceful. Nothing wrong with that . . . but maybe it is not the only way. I kind of like having a few 4-by-8 sheets of marine plywood in stock and enough power and hand tools to turn them into bits and pieces and sawdust in a long day. I like buying epoxy 2 gallons at a time, and I like to occasionally sleep in a king-size bed with my lady love in a home that does not roll or pitch and has withstood many a storm without anyone there to mind it.
There are lots of ways to go cruising. The journey is on the inside anyway.
