Buy one of those roller thingies to use on charts--- the deal where you enter the chart scale and then roll the tip along the route you plan to take and the readout tells you how many miles/nautical miles it is. We have one--- very handy device. Run this thing around your planned route and do the math. Distance divided by miles/nautical miles per hour times the amount of fuel the boat burns in an hour. You can add a bit for warm up times and then multiply the total by the anticipated cost of fuel per gallon (or litre if you're buying it that way). There's your "total fuel cost" answer.
Otherwise you've asked a pretty much impossible question to answer since every boater will have a different idea of how long they're willing to run each day, how long they want to remain in one place, what speed they want to run, what route they want to take, and so on. You might get figures from boaters who have done the same sort of thing (if they've bothered to keep track of their expenses), but the chances are they won't relate too much to what you end up doing since they probably did almost everything differently even though they covered the same ground.
Based on the very few people I've known who've lived on their boats full time AND cruised them full time, the cost to live full time on a boat that's going somewhere (as opposed to tied up more or less permanently in a slip) is not much different than the cost of living on shore. You don't have the house payment and other expenses related to a home, but you may have similar costs for a boat depending on if you've financed it, and so on. You don't have car repairs and fuel bills but you have boat repairs and fuel bills, which in our experience so far average out to be more than the car(s) In the end, according to them, it was pretty much a wash. You eat the same amount of food, either cooked yourself or purchased, you buy the same amount of books and magazines, you go to the same number of movies, your medical/dental costs are the same, and so on. For these people, they moved onto the boat for a number of years for the lifestyle, not to reduce costs, and they continued to do all the things they had done when they lived on shore.* They just did them in a string of other places.* They got into this figuring their total living expenses would not change much in terms dollars spent, and for the most part, they said they didn't.
Now if you not only move onto a boat but also change your lifestyle to reduce personal expenditures considerably, you can perhaps live for a lot less even though you're operating the boat full time.* I don't know--- I've not met anyone who's done this.
You've probably read or heard that the VERY average cost of owning a boat--- at least a power boat, don't know about sail--- is about ten percent of the purchase price (or value) of the boat per year. We've found that, over time, this is a relatively accurate figure. Some years have been much less than ten percent, other years have been much more. Ownership costs are considered to be moorage, insurance, electricity, fuel, maintenance, repairs, upgrades, and perishables (lube oil, filters, toilet paper, boat cleaning supplies, etc.). For the purposes of the ten-percent formula as it was explained to me, ownership costs do NOT include boat payments if you've financed the boat.
-- Edited by Marin on Saturday 22nd of May 2010 03:33:17 PM
