Expedition Yachts

It’s 1:30 am and I’ve been trying to sleep since midnight. The burn in my feet from neuropathy is pretty intense tonight and hard to ignore when trying to sleep.

Another crazy idea I had recently was instead of living in a recreational vehicle (RV), I would buy a yacht, live on the boat, and travel the world. A long time ago I had a coworker that actually lived in Arizona but worked in Irvine. He would fly in Monday morning, get his car from the airport parking lot, and drive to work nearby. Instead of staying at a hotel or apartment, he would sleep in his 45 foot yacht at Balboa Marina for the next few nights, and return to Arizona Thursday evening. He took a few of us out on his boat down to Dana Point and back. It was pretty cool.

I believe my coworker had a sports cruiser so it only had a two decks, was pretty fast, and had terrible range. We probably traveled about 30 miles total and used $300-400 of fuel. The yacht was probably fine to sleep in for a few nights a week, but you couldn’t travel far in it. What I had in mind was to live on the boat long-term, and visit exotic locations worldwide. For that, you need something that has a cruising range of thousands of miles, not hundreds. Since I’m not rich, I can’t afford a superyacht with a full-time crew. The other option available is buying a smaller expedition yacht. I mentioned before that I’ve been watching a lot of yacht videos on YouTube. One brand that stands out is Nordhavn. They make expedition yachts from 41 feet to 148 feet long that can cross oceans. You can get a fairly new 52 foot boat for about $1 million. It’s not cheap, but think of it as buying a house.

On YouTube, there are lots of videos of people making thousand mile trips in Nordhavn boats. They even organized a group trip across the Atlantic Ocean in 2004.

However, unlike buying a RV and driving across the country alone, I don’t think you can operate a expedition yacht by yourself. Each boat in the above video has a multi-person crew. In a RV, if something breaks down, you can always pull over and call for help. If your boat breaks down in the middle of the ocean, you’re on your own. I also think traveling by boat is a 24/7 job so you can’t take 10 hours out each night for dialysis. It’s doable in a RV but not in a boat with 25 foot waves. So if I really want to do this, it will have to wait until after a kidney transplant. Probably need to sell my house too in order to afford a decent boat. It will likely be very expensive to operate a boat, much like owning a private jet, but it would be cool to visit the South Pacific in your own yacht.

This is post #400!