Our 2007 Beneteau Oceanis 40: why, pros, cons and costs // The cost of cruising compared - Part 2

Hi guys! This is the second video of a mini-series on the cost of cruising, in which a couple of friends and I laid down the cost of buying and sailing our boats full-time. Last week, we had a look at our friend Marky's 32-foot catch from 1974. So if you haven't seen it, the link is over my head, below. In this video, we will look at our own sailboat, Polar Seal, a Beneteau Oceanis from 2007. We will look at how much it cost us to buy her, to maintain her, to dock her, to insure her and to power her. Yeah, just that. As someone pointed out in the comment section last week, the cost of cruising our boat is the product of choices that we made. Today, we're gonna give you a look into our choices, in what context we bought our boat and what were our criteria. Then we're gonna give you a little tour of Polar Seal, if you want to see a full tour and check out our every corner, I made a video about it. It's 20 minutes long and it's all about our boat. You can go check it out at the link that's over my head. And in this video, we're gonna talk about what we think are the pros and cons of our boat and we're gonna break down the cost of buying and operating her full-time. So with very little transition, let's just dive in and go to Polar Seal. If you follow this channel, you know that three years ago, Ryan and I had no experience of sailing and the internet kind of got us into cruising. We took a course, a two-weeks RYA course and at the end of which, we decided that we were going to buy our boat. So needless to say, we bought Polar Seal with very little experience of sailing. We really bought the boat without knowing what we wanted or what we needed and as time has evolved, there's been things that we really like about the boat and there's things that maybe we wish were improved or different about the boat, which is probably a discussion for a whole nother time. But it's the boat we have and it works well for us. Yeah, exactly. It's the boat that is taking us out on the planet's oceans. Yeah. Okay, we're gonna do an Atlantic circuit, which is leave from Stockholm, go down the coast of Portugal and cross through the Caribbean and come back to Stockholm all in about 12 to 18 months. And then from there, probably sell the boat and move on with life. But we've kind of changed and have decided to do it more of a lifestyle for a while versus just a quick Atlantic circuit. And that's why we're in the Med right now and we are probably gonna stay here for a few years and try to live a little bit. I think with boats, we were looking at boats that look comfortable, that look very like homely. So we wanted a big cockpit. I remember I always wanted to be able to lay down in the bench in the cockpit. Before we bought the boat, I really wanted a separate shower and a galley that would allow me to cook meals the exact same way that I was cooking meals when we were living in the apartment. I need to have proper nav equipment, so I need to be able to know where I'm going and the proper tools to sail the boat and beyond that. Ryan could live without a shower. You confessed last night that the level of comfort that we have on the boat is because of me. The Benete Ocean is for you from 2007 and right now we're in the cockpit, which is one of our favorite parts of the boat and in here you can fit like 10 people, I think. It's like, it's really big. This table spreads, it gets really big and yeah, it's a nice cockpit when you're at anchorage or at a marina. The Holy Seal is the two-cabin version of the Benete Ocean S40. It means that most of our sister boats will have a second cabin coming here, where I stand. But in the two-cabin version, we have a galley that is actually a little bigger, as well as a garage that we can access from the cockpit. On the other side of the galley, I have the bathroom and the bathroom is really small, so getting a camera in there is not the most practical thing to do, but if you come closer, closer, closer, we have the sink, we have the head and the shower that's like on the other side. And this is like adjacent to the bathroom, is where we sleep. It's the aft cabin. The only thing that I maybe regret on the boat is the lack of headspace above our bed, but I mean, for the most part, it's like a very comfortable bed. This is our living area. It's big. We can be quite a lot of people in this place. And yeah, that's pretty much where we spend most of our time. At the front of the boat, we have the beavers, which right now acts as a storage space. We are about to leave the boat for the winter and that's where we've thrown like pretty much everything. We're not going to give you a detailed view of it at the moment, but yeah, that's where guests sleep or crew sleeps when we have crew on board. And yeah, right now it looks like that. Yeah. And that's it. On board Polar Seal, there's a few things that we have. We have water tanks. We do not have a water maker, so we need to fill up every time. We have about 350 liters of space available for water. We also have a hot water heater, which can either be powered electrically or when the engine's running, it will also heat up the water in the water tank, which is really nice. Yes. So sometimes we just run the engine if we need to charge the batteries and we want to take a hot shower. The electrical system that we have powers everything. We have a 12-volt system, which today has around 300 amp hours worth of power. That's going to change, but again, a story for another time. We have an inverter so we can move the power from DC to AC. That's pretty powerful. Works well. This spring, we're going to upgrade to lithium and we're going to have around 600 amp hours of power. We have a pretty standard nap system on board the boat. Most boats come with one chart plotter, a windex, so something that can read the wind speed and angle direction, a depth finder. We do have a radar, which we're upgrading, and then obviously a VHF. But the one thing that was a little different about this boat is it actually had a second chart plotter. So we have one in the cockpit and one downstairs at the chart table, which is really nice. No, we don't have a generator. We don't really find a huge use for it, I would say, between the solar and us just using the engine for various things. We haven't really been like, oh, we need a generator. Isn't that something that... We don't have big power draws. Today we don't have, like I said, we don't have a water maker. We don't have air conditioning. Our heater is diesel electric, so it uses diesel as the power source, as the heat source, and then a little bit of electricity just to run it. The biggest power draw is the stuff we brought on the boat, which is most of the camera gear, the computers. That's pretty much it. But yeah, our boat is not the big, super luxurious version of a sailboat. It doesn't have all the appliances that you could think yourself having, but it does have stuff that works for us. Yep. My favorite thing about the boat is the galley. I think it's constructed really well. It's safe. You can tuck yourself in there if the seas are high, but there's still enough room when you're at the marina or an anchor to move around. The other thing that I like is our garage. There's a lot of space in the garage for stuff, even though I'm pretty particular about what goes in there and how it's placed. Like right now, I'm not super happy, but it's just because it's winter. I haven't even touched it. No, I know. I would say that the one thing that I would like to see improved is our ability to be independent. We're touching on that with the big power upgrade that we're doing this year with added 600 watts of solar panels and lithium batteries. But I really like to have a water maker so that we could spend more time at anchorage without worrying about having to fill the water tanks and be super conservative with our water consumption. I would agree with you there. And then I would also add, this is just the boat that we picked, so it's not a problem, but it's something I would look at differently if we bought a different boat. But the handholds in the cabin area where we are right now are pretty poor for when we're underway. There's a lot of open space, and if the boat's knocking around, it can get wild down here if you're not really paying attention. And then the same goes for the cockpit. The cockpit is great when you're either in kind of flatter seas or at anchor at the marina, but you're very exposed to seas when they're bigger. And that's something we never really thought about when we were picking the boat. No, because why would you imagine yourself in a big storm? We never thought that through very well. Like, well, what is big seas? Like, is three meter waves big seas or three meter swell? No, that can be normal on a day in the Atlantic, but it can be uncomfortable in that cockpit. So those are some things. There's nothing we can do really to change that in this boat. That'd be like a whole design change. But it's some things that I think about quite a bit. Okay. For the market value of Polar Seal today, it's about 90,000 euros. All right. Yeah. You can go on yachtworld.com, look for Benito Ocean. It's 40 from 2007. There are probably a million out there, and that's about the around price that they go for. In terms of the maintenance cost, we spend about 6,000 euros a year. Now, maintenance itself is not very expensive, but each year we invest in a big ticket item. So the first year we redid the canvas. The second year we did the rigging. This year we redid the hull, and we bought new sails. For marina fees, we spend roughly about 600 euros a month. And that varies from month to month, depending if we're anchoring or if we're not, or where we are. When we crossed between Stockholm and Northern Brittany, so when we went through the Baltic, the North Sea, and the English Channel, we couldn't anchor at all. So everywhere we went, we went in marinas. Now, this year we started anchoring a lot more, and with our newly gained independence next year, we expect this number to go down. I mean, I say that now. Everybody says that their marina cost could go down. We will see. Alright, in terms of the fuel, we spend about 100 euros a month. That is also a number that we expect will go down, again, when we transported the boat between Stockholm and, yeah, I think down here. We were pretty aggressive in the way that we viewed it. It changed a lot when we got to Spain. We sailed a lot more, so we definitely saw our fuel cost go down, but I would say that's a good average amount for our trip this year. So the next one is insurance, and this year we spent 1,300 euros on insurance for the year. Typically, the insurance is between 1 and 2% of the haul value. The first two years, the insurance was a little bit lower. This year, it went up, I think primarily due to all of the hurricanes, so we definitely felt that with our insurance, and I know others did as well. Also, our insurance is based on where we are sailing in the world, and this is the cost for the Mediterranean. Yep. Okay, and now to the most important part of your cruising budget, the bar. The bar tab. What are we spending it on? I don't remember. Well, I drink hardly any anymore. So what's your bar tab? My bar tab is, I don't remember. We don't remember. There are many other boats that matched our criteria at the time that we bought Forlossil. We could have bought a Jeanneau, a Dufour, a Bavaria, or many other, but we just like the finish of the Beneteau better. Although we regret not being a little more sheltered in the cockpit when we're on passages, the reality is that for one day that we spent at sea, we spent about seven at Anchorage or at the marina. And in these days, we just really enjoy the big cockpit and the swimming platform that we have. Some newer boats come with a center cockpit that offers both a swimming platform, a little bigger and better space in the cockpit, and easier way to navigate the interior of the boat in rough seas. But typically, those boats come at a price tag that we simply cannot afford. All in all, our Beneteau Oceanis 40 from 2007 is a great boat for us, for our level of sailing, and for our cruising plans. There may come a time when we want to upgrade Forlossil for a boat that is more rigged towards adventure sailing. But for the next three to four years, we will be sailing in the Mediterranean, crossing the Atlantic, and sailing the Caribbean. And Forlossil is just perfect for that kind of sailing. So by the time that we actually feel the need to make that upgrade, we will have had probably seven good years with our Beneteau Oceanis 40, which is a good amount of time. So that's it for this one. I hope that you found this video insightful. If you did, leave it a thumb up or consider subscribing. In the next episode of our mini-series, we will go to our friend's beautiful Amel 54 from 2007 named Tenga. I am already looking forward to that one. Thanks again for watching, and I will see you next time. Bye!