Costs of Owning a Boat - "Seas The Day" (Catalina 425) 6th & Final Season Costs

  

Photo Credit:  Wealth Management

Most important... We sold Seas The Day, our Catalina 425!!!, so this post will cover this weird season where she was for sale and not being used heavily.

For reference see last year's post for 5th season costs of owning a Catalina 425.

Second, a citation... we did this experiment with our Catalina 315.  Additional links to the costs over our ownership of that vessel are found on that page.

If you click on the 315 link above and go back to the first-year costs, I spoke about how we didn't approach buying a boat lightly and how we carefully researched costs and couldn't find specifics so I decided to share mine so others could understand the total picture about boat ownership.  Purchasing the 425 was less researched, but still the total costs figured large in our brief discussions.  For that reason, and to be able to project from year to year, we are continuing this tally.

As in the other cost-related posts, we'll group the costs into three categories.

ONE-TIME COSTS - costs of major equipment that we don't expect to have regularly.

RECURRING COSTS - costs that we expect to see yearly as owners.

EXCURSION COSTS - costs for longer multi-day excursions.  We did zero multi-day excursions this year... we only did a few days of sailing on the Chesapeake Bay.

Once again please understand that I'm rounding excessively.   If you're a CPA type, you're going to rapidly realize that things don't cross-check, etc.  The goal here is to share approximate costs to other potential boat owners, not to give an exact accounting.

ONE-TIME COSTS:

There were no one-time costs this year.

RECURRING COSTS:

Recurring costs are the costs for running the boat for the year assuming we never did anything other than take day trips and anchoring out in the northern Chesapeake area (e.g., no additional marina costs).

Our total recurring costs round to $32,600 (remember, everything is rounded).

The mortgage is $2500/month and we only paid that for January to September - $22,500.

Insurance for the partial year was $1200 (net of refund at the end).

The marina clocked in at $7100 (including electric).  Note that this was higher since we paid month-to-month (because we might have sold her early in the season).

Commissioning in the spring came to $1200.

A short haul mid-summer was $600.

EXCURSION COSTS:

There were no excursion costs... we only had it out for a few day-sails.

SUMMARY: 

There is only one way to describe this season... even with much reduced expenses, it was a colossal waste of money.  We spent 5 days out on the water; stayed aboard for 12 nights.  So each night on the water cost us $2716, which is less than last years were we lost half the season, but still much higher than the typical of ~ $1500 from earlier years.

It was time to sell her... it would have been better to sell her earlier.  While the saying that "the best two days in the life of a boat owner are the day they buy the boat and the day they sell her" isn't really true (we had many many happy days with Seas The Day), we were relieved in the end that she sold.

OVERALL SUMMARY

Here are Season 1 Costs (August to December 2019) which were $74,000 ($62K of that in startup costs)

Here are Season 2 Costs (January to December 2020) which were $44,400.

     (Note that we posted the "Is it worth it" post this year.)

Here are Season 3 Costs (January to December 2021) which were $44,000.

Here are Season 4 Costs (January to December 2022) which were $45,000.

Here are Season 5 Costs (January to December 2023) which were $45,000.

And Season 6 Costs (above) were $32,600.

That gives a total on Seas The Day (Catalina 425) of $211,800 over the 5 years that we owned her.  I can add, that total reflects the proceeds we got from selling her when all the dust cleared.  During that time we had a total of 142 days out on the water, and 230 nights onboard (with up to 4 guests on a given night).

Finally (since they all cite it), remember our citation at the beginning about the cost experiment with our earlier Catalina 315 costs.  There we had $127,500 in costs for 120 days on the water (we only spent a few nights on board that boat during the 5.25 years we had her.

And then the final total... $339,300 over the 10.25 years we owned new(ish) Catalina sailboats.

Was it worth it??  I think so.  We had a blast over our 10 years of sailing.  But like most hobbies, it started to loose its luster, and once we stopped doing it every weekend of the season, it just no longer made financial sense to keep at it.