Living aboard

Vagabond afloat

Sam Taylor joined that hardy bunch of sailors willing to forgo the comforts of life ashore in order to enjoy the sometimes dubious pleasures of living afloat

Ithink I’m going to buy a boat!”

My parents faces dropped, in the way that only parents whose now-adult offspring has just announced that they intend to do something stupid and dangerous can. The year was 2020, the coronavirus was raging, and I had just returned to the UK after several years of absence, fleeing back across the Irish Sea with my tail between my legs as the relationship to which I had dedicated the last three years of my life collapsed around me.

Watching the sun sink into the sea behind me, a long side-lined dream began to resurface.

I had learned to sail at a young age, mostly in Toppers, Wanderers, and other small dinghies, with the occasional memorable foray aboard larger craft. It was around this time that this idea had begun to take shape in my naïve, youthful, brain. I wanted to sail, not just across the placid waters of the lakes of my native Devon, but for far greater distances, and for far longer. I wanted to live on the water full-time, to cross oceans, to see far-off lands. A romantic notion to be sure, but as I mooched around old haunts, having ignominiously been obliged to move back in with my long-suffering family, this old dream begun to take shape, to solidify into a plan.

As the Wexford coast dropped astern of the Stena Europe, I took stock. I had a car, along with a small amount of savings salvaged from the wreckage of my time in Ireland. A brief peruse of the websites of certain well-known yacht brokerages, sorted by least expensive, gave cause for hope. There were boats out there; granted many were in various states of decay and would require a substantial investment of time and resources to be returned to a seaworthy state, but they were out there.

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Sam selected a venerable Eventide 26 to live aboard. The mix of modest price, decent headroom and shoal draft all helped

A suitable craft

I could afford them, just, but as I continued my procrastinationinspired internet searches, it became apparent that, while many people were doing what I wanted to do, those people were in a very different position to me. Many appeared to be

toothed proprietor of the yard, who informed me that I was still paid up until the end of the month, and yes, he could certainly lift her in, but it would have to be tomorrow. Once I was on the water, I would be able to stay there without any difficulties until I was ready to sail. So, with brush, roller, and tin of antifouling in hand, I set to work. One alarming crane lift later, on what must have been one of the windiest days in the last month, and Morag was in the water. I quickly moved aboard and, armed with paint-scraper and epoxy resin, began my long battle with the leaking roof, which would continue for many months to come.

retired, others were couples, and a surprising number of the latter group had children. Many wrote of heading to Southampton Boat Show, brochures in hand, to peruse the latest offerings by the likes of Dufour and Beneteau. One memorable article described their pick as “modest…the cost of a second home”. Not one of them lived on a boat of less than 30 feet. Clearly, a very different experience awaited me.

It’s very hard to find concrete statistics for cruising liveaboards, especially those living on sailing boats. The inherently transient nature of the lifestyle, coupled with a desire to avoid census counts (and the spectre of the taxman that follows them) make this shadowy community hard to measure. Far easier to count are those who live on barges or houseboats on the UK’s canals and rivers; according to Stephen Hardy of the Canal and River Trust, which manages the use of inland waterways, about 27% of the 34,450 boaters in 2019/2020 were liveaboards, of which about 5,500 cruise the system continuously. It’s therefore not unreasonable to assume that the numbers living on sailing yachts are fairly similar – after all, the up-front cost of boats is roughly the same, and while dealing with the challenges of sailing on open water might put off a few, the number is still likely to number in the thousands.

Statistics set aside, I continued my search, and eventually alighted on a venerable Eventide 26 by the name of Morag Morgan. Designed by the legendary Morris Griffiths, these excellent little boats have a reputation for being seaworthy while still able to take the ground; the previous owner (who had had her for over 40 years) told tall tales of an acquaintance who had supposedly crossed the Indian Ocean in one. Equipped with a large galley, a forward cabin, and a working head, she had the bare minimum of space for a single person to live fairly comfortably aboard. I had paid a little over £4,000 for her.

First things first: my new purchase was on dry land in a boatyard on the outskirts of Fareham, on the River Wallington. While the fees were relatively reasonable by the standards of the average yachtsman, it wasn’t possible to live on board full time while the boat was on the hard, and hotels were hard to come by. However, I received a stroke of good luck, in the form of the snaggle-

ABOVE

Marinas are a tempting but costly option for the liveaboard with a tight budget

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Morag was fairly basically equipped but most things continued to function

Living afloat

One of the things that had most attracted me to Morag was the equipment that came with her. Granted, most of it hadn’t been replaced in 20 years, but it was functional, and that was all I needed. This greatly reduced the amount I had to shell out over the first few weeks and months of living and sailing aboard. Other boats I had viewed, while they may have been cheaper upfront, would have cost me far more in the long run, since they had lacked such basic necessities as a radio or batteries, to say nothing of modern niceties such as a GPS or depth sounder. Morag was equipped with all of these, and despite their various stages of decay, I was convinced I could wring another year or so of life out of them yet.

A piece of sensible advice that is often shared when boat purchases are

discussed is the need for a surveyor. While these knowledgeable individuals are undoubtedly experts in their field, I had forgone their services in favour of my own, highly untrained eye. Accepting the risk that I may have missed some vital, and as yet undiscovered defect, here I must mention another aspect of Morag that set her apart: she had been looked after. Quite simply, the previous owner had spent the last 40-odd years constantly tinkering with her, and it was only a failure of the weight of old age that had resulted in the sale. Many other boats in the price bracket that fitted my constrained financial circumstances had languished in yards for years, sometimes decades. Consigned to barns and the back of cowsheds, they had been all but forgotten, until some reshuffle had forced their sale. Left like this, the possibility for deterioration had skyrocketed, leaving many with serious structural problems that would have been time-consuming to fix at best, and downright dangerous at worst.

Now in possession of my new floating home, low ceilings, leaky roof and all, it became obvious that a proper budget was called for. Again, the modern miracle that is the internet would be no help; budgets found online were often very far removed from the reality ahead of me. So, repairing to an excellent local watering hole, the Castle in the Air, I began to draw up a monthly budget, covering food, fuel, and maintenance, amongst the other vital elements that would keep me afloat.

A modest budget

I set aside £20 per week for food, with lentils, rice, and things-in-tins high on the menu; in a month this would be close to £80. For berthing, I set the arbitrary monthly figure of £150, on the assumption that I might be forced to pick up a mooring buoy from time to time. I was already paying £20 a month for my phone, the data from which would double as my internet access. Assuming that I would need to refill the tanks about once a month, I set aside for diesel £55, and a further £10 per month for butane gas for the cooker. During the winter, I would need to light the small paraffin heater – I estimated about £15 per month extra should be enough. Furthermore, one of the constants of boating life is that things break. With this in the forefront of my mind, I planned to set down £125 monthly to cover emergency expenses. I had already paid for a year’s insurance that covered cruising in the UK and Ireland; it had cost me £72. With the addition of a small amount of personal spending, this came to just £681.

My next consideration was berthing. This was easy; I would be on board the vast majority of the time, so anchoring was the obvious choice. At this, however, I hit a snag: many (although by no means all) ports that I would otherwise have stopped at charged harbour dues, prohibiting long stays, and those that didn’t often had anchorages far away from any of the shore facilities that I would no doubt need. Then, it struck me. Many of the larger harbours, especially those which took the form of estuaries, had large areas of creeks and drying mudflats that, while they gave no indication of suitability for anchoring, didn’t exactly prohibit it either. I was sure that no one would object to my presence, as long as I didn’t obstruct anything and was careful not to make a mess.

In this way, I often found myself but a short row (no outboards here) from exactly the sort of bustling seaside town that I might otherwise have been forced to leave behind. Tucked amongst flotillas of moored yachts, and using two anchors to limit my swing, I was quite able to blend in without any trouble, despite being far away from the lights of other yachts at anchor, and as of yet, I have seen no sign of the dreaded harbourmaster’s launch appearing to move me on.

Morag’s ability to take the ground was another aspect that had caught my attention. I had suspected that I would be obliged to take berths that were less than ideal and being able to dry out expanded my options no end. Aside from my creative choice of anchoring spots, the ability to head upriver on a tide before drying out has saved me from many an uncomfortable night.

At first, power was drawn from the engine, where its miraculously long-lasting batteries allowing me to use lights and charge phones while being only occasionally obliged to run the engine. The addition of a solar panel, charge controller and inverter allowed me to forgo the engine altogether for my electrical needs as well as the need for frequent trips ashore simply to charge a laptop.

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A tranquil, well protected anchorage is a liveaboard's idea of heaven

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The benefits of a bilge keel fully demonstrated