He tells me the harbour rental is one of best kept secrets. He only pays $100/mnth (a 1bdr studio in the area would go for $2100/mth) and lives in a beautiful yacht, with a master room and guest space, just minutes away from the downtown core and all the essentials. It's the kind of free-spirited lifestyle i'd like to live in the near future.
My question is, how do you deal with icy water? don't you have to pull out the boat when ice starts to form? In Toronto you could pretty much skate out on the lake in winter.
Basically what happens is that your boat just gets stuck in the ice and moves with the ebb and flow of the water.
The only problem you have is that you can't go anywhere until the ice breaks up. Last winter I got stuck in the ice somewhere in the Copenhagen harbour a few miles from my homeport and ended up staying there for almost three months. Here's a picture: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=oa2m2b&s=7
Side note as someone who grew up in Toronto and lived in the downtown core for several years: A studio would go for under $1200/mo. You can get a pretty swanky 1bdrm for under $1400/mo. Though I have no doubt one could also find an apartment for much more than $2100/mo, too.
I did a quick search for monthly boat fees to park them in the marina, looks like it's around $20.25/ft/mo [1]. Any idea which marina your friend uses?
[1] http://www.harbourfrontcentre.com/thewaterfront/marine/rates...
In my part of the world that's pretty cheap. Might be expensive elsewhere though.
I see yachts selling for over $500k...
I am seriously considering this. Can you please point me to some links? I am in NYC. Maybe I can buy a yacht somewhere else and sail it to NYC?
You'd do well to keep your VHF radio open on channel 16 though(this is where boats communicate with each other when at sea). I've had customs call med up when passing the border from the Netherlands to Germany to hear who I was and where I was going. Once they got a satisfactory answer we never heard from them again.
I've kind of shelved it for now since I'm pretty busy doing other things, but I hope that I'll have time to do it within the next year sometime. I don't think it's a great way of making money though, so it's not a top priority. More like a hobby project.
Have always wanted to do this.
How do you shower?
Simple :-)
Overall I'm happy and would buy the same kind of boat again. The Dutch build excellent boats and have for centuries. The only thing that bothers me is that since it's a canal boat it has very low draft (0.8 meters) and almost no keel which is great if you're sailing in canals that aren't very deep, but makes for a pretty rocky ride once you hit some real waves.
I'd never buy a wooden boat, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that doesn't work professionally with wood.
Can you not sail south for winter to the Medditterranian? South of France or Italy would be a nice warm place to overwinter.
I bought it in Holland, and knew absolutely nothing about boats when I started out. My thought was that the only regrets you have when you get old are all the things you didn't do. Besides I'm enough of a businessman that I'd be able to sell it without a loss if it didn't work out. So I gave it try.
Four years later I'm still here and wouldn't want to live any other way. The boat is paid for so my only expenses are $200 a month in harbour rent and roughly another $200 a month on repairs. Internet isn't a problem since 3G is everywhere now - I can surf hacker news while at anchor somewhere off the coast of Sweden.
The upsides are pretty obvious: A gret free lifestyle, beautiful views, ducks right outside your window and the ability to go anywhere you want (within limits...)
The downsides are that it's cold in the winter, you don't have a lot of space, and you need to become a bit of a handyman. I've bought powertools I didn't know existed five years ago.
But overall it can only be recommended. Oh, and drop me a line if you're ever in Copenhagen I'll take you for a trip through the harbour, it's beautiful just before the sun sets.