Considering a liveaboard

Hey folks -

My wife and I have enjoyed our 40' Tolly for the past year, and we're now thinking about selling the house and moving onboard a boat for good. (Or at least until the housing market comes back down so we can sell high and buy low!)

Anyhow, the 40' Tolly is great for vacationing, but the size isn't right for our family... which includes my wife and myself, plus our 3 teenage daughters. At a minimum, we're looking at 3 staterooms (our younger two have shared a room forever), 2 heads w/ showers, which probably means something around 50 feet long.

It's strange to me that in the Northwest, you can find a decent 40' boat for $50k, but you can barely look at a 50' boat for less than $200k!

Well, I'd love to hear some suggestions.


Here are some important notes:

* We live on the Puget Sound, and we want to take the boat up and down the Sound every weekend, and take an occasional trip up to Friday Harbor. One day, maybe Alaska. So the boat needs to be able to handle choppier waters.

* My kids aren't hard on furniture or anything, but I would like to stay away from interiors made of cardboard or balsa. I'm being facetious, obviously, but I've heard some things about certain boats as it relates to interior workmanship, and that's of some importance to me.

* Fiberglass.

* A big galley. My wife LOVES to cook, and that's her happy place.

So... I think those are our major requirements.

Thanks!

You need to look for old Hatterras 50’s and 53’s to find the room you are asking for. They can be found priced from $100,000 to $300,000. Figure you will need another $100,000 for maintenance un less you are very boat savvy. Make sure you have a liveaboard slip lined up. There are long waiting lists for liveaboard slips in the PNW.

If you sell a house now I believe you are selling at a low point not a high point.

tiltrider1 said:

You need to look for old Hatterras 50’s and 53’s to find the room you are asking for. They can be found priced from $100,000 to $300,000. Figure you will need another $100,000 for maintenance un less you are very boat savvy. Make sure you have a liveaboard slip lined up. There are long waiting lists for liveaboard slips in the PNW.

If you sell a house now I believe you are selling at a low point not a high point.

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I'm mechanically and electronically savvy, and I'm finding that a lot of that skillset transfers over to my current boat. Hopefully that helps! And as for the slips - yup. I'm on a waiting list currently.

As for the house... I disagree. At least in the South Puget Sound, all of my realtor buddies are complaining about lack of inventory because houses get snatched up very quickly, driving the prices up. Our houses is up significantly in the six months we've owned it; it's really insane right now.

"Our houses is up significantly in the six months we've owned it; it's really insane right now."

Stand by , the Federalies are once again promoting sub prime loans & reduced down payments to get new folks into housing.

This may cause another bubble , the best time to be a seller!

Agree that a Hatteras in the range mentioned above would be a very good choice. The Hatteras 53 MY would be an excellent choice. Also a Jefferson 52 would fill your needs very well although I don't know if any are on the west coast now. Check both of them out on Yacht World and you will see what we are talking about.
I'm sure that there are many other make/models to choose from.
Good luck with your search and enjoy.

Here is a Gulf Star that is over on your side. Might be of interest to you.
https://www.yachtworld.com/boats/1985/gulfstar-acmy-3504719/?refSource=standard listing

So far, the only boats with an interior layout that seem to work well for our family is the Bayliner 4588 and 4788. We'll look at some more boats later this week (they all kind of blurr together after looking at so many!), but between the main cabin entrance in the back, galley on the same level, the (almost) 3 staterooms, it all seems to work.

We're not dead set on it yet, but it's what we've been most impressed with so far.

I like the 53 Defever POC. We looked at the Bayliner 4788 and found it to be tight in the forward staterooms and the engine room.

Yeah - the 4788 is really 2.5 staterooms. Two are reasonable, and the third typically gets converted into a closet for the master stateroom. It's interesting. I'm not certain that it'll work, but we like everything else about the boat. My 40' Tolly has similar engine room clearance, so it feels familiar.

Also a 47’ Defever POC has 3 staterooms although 2 are in the stern so there isn’t quite as much privacy for the master stateroom.

There are a lot of choices for a liveaboard boat.

I live on a 4788 Bayliner.

Here is a great discussion on the subject

https://www.liveaboard-boats.com/fo...echnical/41-what-makes-a-good-liveaboard-boat

There are some people living and cruising on a 4788 who are documenting it on their youtube channel "Technomadia"
Their business is advising on computers and connectivity on boats and rvs.
JohnS

I think my wife and I are looking at a Navigator 5800. We didn't originally plan to spend so much money, but that's sort of how it goes, I suppose. The 3 larger staterooms, plus the fact that the master is separated from the other two makes living with teenagers a little more tolerable.

I'm used to houses, where there's a reasonable assumption that you can get a few bucks ahead if you fix up a house and sell it after a few years. Spending $400k+ on a pristine boat is harder to get my head around, as far as the economics go.

Why not step up into something that doesn't need to be attached to a berth?
The boat may, or at not, cost more to buy but the savings in berth rental should far outweigh the extra expense and the comfort levels improve greatly.

We haven't seen a berth in 3 years and that's a saving of around $50,000 here.
Diesel and maintenance in that 3 years sorted.

jovial_cynic said:

...where there's a reasonable assumption that you can get a few bucks ahead if you fix up a house and sell it after a few years. ...

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Maybe, maybe not. Depends where you live. You might have to sit on the house for a long time before it goes up enough to be "ahead" at the end.

"plus our 3 teenage daughters."

Who will be moving on in a few years.

Giving them private cabins is fine , but when there gone you once again will be selling a boat to purchase a "right sized" boat , unless you can enjoy 3 extra empty cabins , just in case they come for a visit.

FF said:

"plus our 3 teenage daughters." ...

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This will also require at least three separate heads.

Try going bigger
Baby boomers that have moved up in size every 5 years might have something in the 60 to 80 that are harder to sell.They have decided to sell because family doesn't have the time anymore and it's a ball and chain and it has to go
What their asking they will not get.
10 years ago we had broker that thought we were nuts to sell a 70 footer less than $700 k
I was a ball and chain because of a new boat and we sold it for $380 K as a live a board to some guy in downtown Vancouver

Another I would add to your search (and i am sure you are already looking considering you have a Tolly), is a 53 and 57 Tollycraft. the Widebody (17' beam) gives a ton of room, and 3 proper rooms, 2 heads/showers, and a nice galley. They are similar boats with the longer having a larger aft deck.

before buying ours, we considered a 53 Navigator as well. it was 11 years newer, and 40k cheaper than the tolly we went with, but you could tell a big difference in build quality and space. The Navigators from what I understand all are based on the same 15' beam, which gets narrow especially with full walk around.

Ive been a fulltime liveaboard since last fall. The Bayliner 4788's are very cool boats. I toured the one in Braintree, Ma (on Yachtworld currently) over the winter. I fell in love with the layout and was considering buying her but I didn't think I was ready for a 50 footer.

JadePanama said:

... we considered a 53 Navigator as well. it was 11 years newer, and 40k cheaper than the tolly we went with, but you could tell a big difference in build quality and space. The Navigators from what I understand all are based on the same 15' beam, which gets narrow especially with full walk around.

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The 5800 has a 17'+ beam, so this may be a different creature entirely. I think our experience looking at the larger Tollys is that the lack of exterior walk-around was a little uncomfortable for us. Yes, we enjoyed the larger interior space, but we also want to be able to get around the exterior of the boat for ease of docking, dropping fenders, etc.

Man, this is a hard decision.

Yeah I get it. The no walk around hasn’t been really a big deal. We just drop one from the fly bridge and the rest you have easy access to. Tolly does have 57’s with walk arounds as well. Couple on yacht world

jovial_cynic said:

The 5800 has a 17'+ beam, so this may be a different creature entirely. I think our experience looking at the larger Tollys is that the lack of exterior walk-around was a little uncomfortable for us. Yes, we enjoyed the larger interior space, but we also want to be able to get around the exterior of the boat for ease of docking, dropping fenders, etc.

Man, this is a hard decision.

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Yes - Navigator has a 15' beam all the way between their 42' and 56' boats. The 58' is when they step up to a larger everything, beam , weight, draft, engines etc.
Much different boat than their 56'.

We have been living aboard 8 years now on our 58 ft Vantare and love it. We left San Francisco in 2015 have have cruised full time ever since. The last three years have been in Mexico. Our boat is a wide body, which I wouldn’t change. In order to have the walk around sides, you give up 3 ft of interior width. No thank you.i live aboard every day, three times a year the walk around would be nice.

An older model that conceptually attracts me is the Hatteras 58' yachtfisher. I'm a bit put off by the older 32V systems and the ladder (instead of stairs) to the flybridge, but those might not be concerns for everyone...

-Chris

The boat next to us is a 62 Hatteras, took a tour, it is very big, the owners live aboard for past 5 years.


They love it

We sold our house and bought a boat for our family of 4. We looked for 18 months and it ended w an 82 - 44ft Island Gypsy. It's been great so far! 3 Staterooms and a layout that works good for us. 3 Staterooms really limited our options so it took awhile. We also considered some 2 Staterooms w Pilot house that could be used for a kids room. The Grand banks motor yacht was another nice 3 Stateroom

A