Own a boat

“I bought a 32ft monohull and got a great price on it. Since then I have learnt that everything I did before was maybe 1% of the learning process on a course that will probably last my whole life and in which the tuition fees are thousands of dollars a year. Nothing prepared me for the infinite intricacies of owning a boat: how to moore safely, how to fix issues with the rigging, how to fix issues with the sails, how to fix issues with the hull, how to fix issues with the engine, how not to inadvertently cause thousands of dollars worth of damage through some small oversight. I broke a furler and forestay by not realising that the jib halyard had wrapped around both and twisted them to breaking points. I caused $5000 of damage by trying to reverse my boat out of my berth into a narrow marina and dinging another boats railings at low speed. I almost destroyed the engine by getting some seaweed sucked into the water intake and not realising it lacked a seastrainer and running for a few mins without cooling. Today I feel like my boating self-esteem has reached an all time low, not for anything huge but simply by somehow leaving something on that ran down the boats battery on the day of a lesson that was intended to help my learn how to reverse/park my boat without fucking up again. So that's cancelled. So my boat sits there week after week waiting to be used as my confidence in actually using it falls ever lower.”

“I did get lucky. The previous owner took care of the boat, and I have done my best to do the same. Every time I put the boat away, the engine gets flushed, and the entire deck gets sprayed down, scrubbed with soap, and rinsed again. The engine runs like a top. I had the first maintenance done in the fall of 2020 since taking ownership of the boat three years before. Engine maintenance is supposed to be a yearly thing. I waited more than two years to do it since it’s not been on the water all that often. The report on my engine was good after the maintenance. I’ll continue to do what I’ve been doing and take it in for maintenance when I feel it’s time to do so. If I lived closer and were on the water more often, I would be doing it yearly. My biggest pain point in boat ownership has honestly been trailer lights. I currently have a new set of trailer lights on order and waiting for delivery. I’ve replaced the brake lights as a set three different times now. On my most recent trip, the running lights both went out a day apart.”