153: WOULD WE BUY A CHARTER BOAT AGAIN? Leopard Catamaran 44 from Sunsail/Moorings

Would we buy a charter boat again? Would you? The answer is yes, absolutely. Don't buy a charter boat. Don't buy a charter boat. Buy a private boat. Are you saying we were conned into buying a charter boat? I've got a real gripe with you, Sunsel, and we're coming after you. We're coming after you. Hello, blown away fans. We are coming to you live from Powki, which is in the northern Abacos, and it's just an incredible morning. It's a very secluded anchorage, and we're the only ones here. Yep, it's beautiful. It's just incredible, and we're so glad you're here. But listen, all of you that appreciate all the time and effort that goes into this, and we don't make any money off of this. We're not monetized. We're doing it for you. We would appreciate it if you could subscribe, hit that like button, share it with other people. We love our patrons. Take a look at the end for the names of our patrons. You can find a link to how to become a patron down in the storylines. We love you guys. Okay, let's get on with it, babe. Last week, we shared with you our one-year anniversary of owning a boat and gave some perspective on what that looked like for us and what we learned over the year. And as promised, we said the second video would be answering the question, would we buy a charter boat again? And then a preview for next week is the financial investment to make a charter boat blue water ready and what we had to do to prepare for that. So this is video number two, and we are going to share with you our perspective on would we buy a charter boat again? Are we happy that we bought a charter boat? Oh my gosh, we had such rosy glasses back then and we didn't know anything. We had looked at the Leopard 40 really hard. I'm one new at the factory, but we just, ooh, the prices of those was crazy. Even the basic versions. And also they're not fully depreciated. They're fully appreciated, but not fully depreciated. So we just took this tack to where all of a sudden we started looking at used boats, fully depreciated boats. And we found a general theme that most of our friends with newer boats were boat poor and their boat still had a lot more depreciation to do. And they were still facing a lot of incidents issues that seemed to just be what we would face in a shaken down boat. Right. And in your charter boat, you can get those fixed anywhere, but doing maintenance work, you have to do it at places that are covered by warranty. And when you're out in the boonies like we are, there really are no places like this. And then that just wasn't for us. So we flew down to St. Lucia and bought a 2015 Leopard 44, but it was based out of Grenada. It was moved up to St. Lucia for them to phase out. So we're going to now talk about what were the pros of buying a charter boat? What were the cons of buying a charter boat? Some issues we faced. And then we'll give you our conclusion as to whether we would buy a charter boat again. Starting in a place like St. Lucia in November is ideal because you're way down in the lesser Antilles and that's really hard to get to. So you're in the heart of where you want to be at the very beginning. And logistically with where we planned to have our upgrades done, it was just perfect. If you buy a boat like let's say in the Seychelles or out in French Polynesia, you're out in the middle of nowhere. And you have very few companies to work on your boat that can do metal fabricating, electric. Getting materials there and also having to pay duty is extremely expensive and time consuming. And so you're just kind of out there and stuck. Now one thing they do to compensate for that is usually the price of those boats is lower to attract people to come out there and buy those. But to us it really didn't make sense. If we were in French Polynesia, there are very few parts that are stocked out there. The labor rates are through the roof and anything that you need has to come from Los Angeles. And then they tack 40 percent duty onto it. And then how are you going to get, if you're newbies like us, how are you going to get an entire lithium electric solar system put in by somebody who really knows what they're doing. There's you know pros and cons to everything and we're really happy with the route that we chose. If we would have bought a boat in Fort Lauderdale, it would have easily been sixty to eighty thousand dollars more because people could have gotten to it easily. And coming all the way to St. Lucia, going through quarantine and then having to bring your boat all the way back. First you've got to hire a captain if you don't have time and there are very few people that have the time to get on it and then get upgrades done along the way like we did. So we saved a lot of money and because we were well positioned to enjoy peak season traveling through the Caribbean all the way up through the Bahamas back to North Carolina in time to be north of Cape Hatteras by mid-June for the insurance companies. Yeah so the price was definitely a benefit. We paid $315,000 for our boat. One of the things that is really helpful with a charter boat is it's a blank slate. That could also be a con but for us it was a pro because we were able to decide then what we wanted to add to the boat to make it water safe and efficient. We wanted to buy this boat and build the systems on it so that it became a world-class liveaboard cruising catamaran that we could sail around the world. The great thing is is we got to pick everything. The water maker, the solar, the batteries, the electrical system, the radar, all these key components. Everything. We could trick this boat out to have it do what we wanted it to do but there's a lot of work involved in that. You know you're living on your boat for months. You're doing a lot of work. Other people are doing a lot of work. You're banging into each other. A lot of it's trial and error. Then everything you have is brand new and you've specced it out. The other negative is you know you've got to do all the work but you could buy a boat that has been owned by somebody who brought it from charter who's done a great job on all that work and who's done a ton of sailing. It's been shaken down. It's been proven. That's another way of going about it but you know I really enjoy the research that we're putting into this. I love this research. Getting down into the weeds and learning new things and also where to have it done and getting everything priced out. Blank slate is good. Another benefit of a charter boat is that it is always being used. In our case maybe too much but a boat that's being used is a good thing because it's just never good for a boat to sit. When a boat is sitting and people say well this boat's been on the hard for a couple of seasons and has very low engine hours you need to be a little wary of that because these engines and the boats they have seals on them they need to be used and lubricated. The engines need to be run. So winterizing a boat is kind of rough and we're able because we're living on it all the time we're able to well not me the admiral over here spot things that are going wrong before they become bigger issues and a boat that's been used a lot and that's in charter they have supposedly depends on where you go we'll cover that here in just a minute supposedly they have professional people that are working on your boat and the oil and all the fluids are getting changed on a regular basis and they're just servicing it as issues come up before they get to be too bad and they have to keep these boats in relatively good condition because that's the agreement that they made with the owners and they really value their reputation it enables their business model to work really well to keep these boats in good condition for their owners and also if they have bad boats and they're not working they're not going to make money moorings and sun sail and other charter companies they're on these boats and they're being used and i think that's really a good thing i think the last two things that that pros for us and probably not pros for everyone is that it was a four cabin boat which we were looking for for the additional storage room as beautiful as the owner suite is we just did not think we would spend a lot of time down there and would prefer to have that space to be utilized as storage and i'm so glad we did if you've got a smaller boat space is more crucial weight distribution is very crucial now if you've got a bigger boat it's like having a bigger house you've got room everywhere so you can sure you can have this big one owner's cabin and you've got other places where you can put many other places where you can put your stuff but on a 44 and we're really a 43 spaces at a premium because we have to have all of our tools we're stocked up big time we got food and drink everywhere and i'm glad we did because you know the prices in the bahamas are double everything and those costco runs that we made we were actually making a hundred percent profit off of everything that we bought and the only way we could do that is to store it and store it efficiently having a four cabin gives you two garages up front forward cabins are the least desirable from a space and bed and everything standpoint so they're the ones that are best to be the garage we keep the tools and all that stuff over here on the starboard side most of the food over on the port side and we can distribute the weight a whole lot better so it rides well even how we use water and our tanks up front affects how the boat rides through the water and the boat's cheaper so you've got better utilization of space the only thing that you don't have is that beautiful bathroom but how much time do you spend in the bathroom most of the time we're swimming off the back of the boat using the outdoor shower i guess what i'm again it's all matter of preference and since we moved from china and we had sold everything that we owned in america before we left for dubai and then china we didn't have anything in china that was boat appropriate these were not things that we wanted to bring or it wasn't even worth shipping those things back to the u.s in terms of price so one of the benefits of getting the charter boat was we actually had sheets and pillowcases and kitchen materials that were already on the boat albeit not the greatest quality but it works but it works and it was great at least initially till we could get back to the states and augment with things that we we like you know the only negative you know what the only negative was what when we bought the boat they didn't have the towels set up like the swan and the different animals and everything so i've got a real gripe with you and we're coming after you we're coming after you all right but that's it but that's a great point so the boat's ready to go and think of the snorkels and uh yes the fins so you're ready to go explore the water got it all right there moving on then we're going to talk about some of the cons of buying a charter boat are you saying we were all right we could have been we could have been oh we're after you since the whole morning so you conned us so i think one of the cons is our boat was in grenada and grenada is not known for caring for its boats very well and that could be a lot of places but grenada does have that reputation and when the boat came up to saint lucia and we saw the initial pictures it looked very abused and looked like the repairs had been quite shoddy oh we had rusted engines on the on the dock had to be totally pulled out i mean it was a mess we almost backed out yeah i'm sure the charter business is very popular so they didn't have the time our boat would come in they'd have less than 24 hours to turn it around so they just did the basic repairs that they could i think the point is even though it's moorings or sunsail or another company that you're buying it from you really need to look at the location from a logistical standpoint positioning as well as how well is that charter base run one of the things that we were really fortunate about was the saint lucia base and lynn the team there phased out our boat small change beautifully yeah they spent so much time restoring her a boat that is coming out of charter is five years old and at five years and beyond you're looking at significant issues that will arise with your boat it's no longer smaller things and that's a very general statement i understand that that's one of the cons i would say about buying a charter boat is you have a fully shaken down boat but you also have an very used very used yeah yeah yeah which can be good or bad so part of being very used was there were very high generator hours on our boat 5500 which doesn't bother us a whole lot because we don't use the generator but we appreciate that we had that asset on the boat and it's a kind of a plan b if our solar breaks down which it never has solar's the best on long just rainy stretches and stuff it's good to know that that thing's there so we keep it well serviced but it's got a ton of hours on it when you buy them from charter it's like i bought 70 of a boat i mean you can't even charge something without running the generator can't can't run anything these things don't even have inverters so the generator is on all the time all the time and they can go up to about 10 000 hours until you've got to get them serviced so we've got a more life left in that and we're going to keep it serviced our engine hours were uh about 2500 i think it was yeah normally uh engine hours are about 500 a year while in charter one thing to look out for is one of the engine hours was a lot higher than the other and if we would have been smart back then we would have said well why is that you know there was a rear main seal leak on the one that had the lower hour so people didn't want to run that because it was leaking oil of course when the surveyor comes in they've got all that cleaned up and but that's a little clue to you that something's wrong with a cell drive or the engine and you need to look further into that let's face it most people on charter don't want to put up the main sail because it's kind of a pain and just motoring around with i guess that beer in your hand and just you know that's a whole lot easier so that's what most people do we try to sail whenever we can plus you can't really wait for good wind when you have seven days when you've got seven days you gotta go go go if you're in the bvi's you got this place you want to go to you get this place you want to go to and you're like on a circuit so you're gonna motor most of the time yep really key point another con of buying a charter boat is that it is cosmetically marred we couldn't see a lot of it when we bought the boat or maybe we just didn't know it a lot they showed us the boat at night didn't they with a flashlight well when we pulled her out of the water my goodness well our first uh haul but even before that when we just started getting in the water and looking around at her kind of driving around or my goodness pretty much every aspect of the the gel coat has been damaged and honestly we've only slammed it once into a concrete dock and you've seen those pictures this thing looking at it up close has been slammed into the dock i don't know how many times in the gel slammed into something pretty significant gel coat repairs have been made the good thing is gel coat is easily repairable so it's fiberglass but you can see the wear of the boat it's like a rental car it's been used and abused so buying a charter boat means that again the pro is that it's a blank slate the con is that it takes a lot of time a lot of effort and a lot of money and being in the right location to have it upgraded to a blue water safe boat so we have spent a lot of time at a dock probably four months now uh just getting the boat either repaired or upgraded if you bought a private boat you would not have dealt with what we what we had so a con that is actually a pro for us is that there are no cushions or enclosures with the boat they give you these cheap uh foldable cushions that you can put out and sit on they're like stadiums really poorly done but the con of that is that it's not very comfortable the pro is that we got to choose our own fabric and our own colors for our boat and personalize things as to what we wanted so that's the pro of the con we had very good weather all the way up to st martin with no rain but if you are traveling a long distance without enclosures boy that helm is really exposed so another another con that we have to deal with in a year is that the charter boat comes with a 12-man life raft we're gonna have to replace that and any kind of crossings that we do 12-man is way too big yeah it's really a negative dangerous actually you really shouldn't have a life raft that's two more than what you are in humans because you can fill some with water so let's talk about spare parts one of the downsides again the final con that we're going to talk about today of buying a charter boat is you just have no spare parts or very minimal and they sell these at year five for a reason i mean right after we bought this the fresh water pump went out i mean things are going to start happening you're going to need spare parts and a real plus to buying a boat like let's say going on catamaran site where private owners sell their boats they're going to sell you all the replacement parts that comes with the boat i'm telling you what that's not chump change let's talk about some of the issues that we faced and we do realize that with a five-year-old boat some of them could actually be just wear and tear on a five-year-old boat it could be any boat so we don't want it to seem like well because we bought a charter boat these are the issues you're going to face it's just this is boating in general you just have repair and replace things so we're going to go through lots of little granular details so that these are just what's going to make this whole soup really tasty and entertaining for you and really meaningful um not just talking in generalities so babe why don't you start out about those engines well our engines then we'll talk about the cowboys so the engines had several things that we had to address and we really only realized them after we had done our trip up to saint martin and then the the issue started to surface like the rear main seal failure and what this does is it causes oil to be released into the bilge up underneath so you got to clean this stuff out you got to constantly be monitoring the engine to make sure that your oil pressure does not go down some other issues with our engines the solenoid stopper we have to replace that because we cannot turn the engine off from the control panel we're not sure why but our alternator light continues to come on we have to figure out why that is there were old impellers that were installed in our engines actually and that we have changed out babe you've done great on the impeller girl and the two issues that i think were most significant other than the seals one is the hatches that are covering the engine compartment we're allowing water into that compartment and that is never a good thing salt water or fresh so we chose to change those hatches then try to repair them and then another thing that happens is that's known and you have to pick the boat that you're buying because there are known issues online for all these boats and one of them on ours were the rudders and we have an aluminum tube on there and what happens after four or five years is the bearings on the rudder bearings start corroding and expanding and this thing started seizing up and ours was just about to seize well one was seized and the other one was about to seize so we switched those out for fiberglass bearings and a pvc with needle nose bearings a much better and stronger retrofit but that's something that needs to be done when you haul out also another area where we chose to make changes because of just wear and tear was on our anchor we changed the anchor we changed the bridle and we instead of sticking with the 150 foot of chain which we could have and probably got another year out of it we went to 300 foot of chain we're gonna go to the pacific you get 150 foot chain on these boats and just in general depending on where it's at we need 300 for the pacific and also when you leave the states you go to places like panama to to get chain replaced i've heard a lot of horror stories about cheap chain bad chain that type of thing so that's one thing that we wanted to for many reasons want to switch out immediately and we didn't change the anchor because it wasn't good looking it was a 45 pound delta which is fine i guess for a charter it's cheaper we doubled the size of it and also the quality we went to a 85 pound m1 mantis anchor because it's a storm anchor we're living on this boat and we sleep a whole lot better at night definitely moving on to rigging we needed to replace lines we had one reefing line snap and we have to replace our main halyard as well that has a lot of wear on it we had a davit issue the pivot bolt at the bottom and moving up and down it had worn unevenly kind of a oval like shape it would just bang at a certain point when it was coming up and that type of thing is only going to get worse with time yeah and a similar thing happened with the gooseneck the same kind of wear due to constant motion of the boom created more of a larger hole that was worn out and eroded that needed to be fixed as well brown's already mentioned the fresh water pump that died we had a shower pump that died again these things could be issues that could plague any boat at any time all right moving on to more miscellaneous things we've had to get our air conditioning serviced our logic board replaced in that we've had some issues just uh with the generator one of the more disappointing repairs we've had to make and very expensive was with our vitra frigo two things we had to do one is we had to replace the gaskets which were really deteriorated and needed to be replaced the second one was the slides the charter company had taken out the slide and replaced it with a non-vitra frigo slide and so the freezer couldn't actually seal because the slide was too long they made a repair that was not effective and that's just disappointing but it is what it is we have finally dealt with our leaky escape hatch that's been plaguing us for for almost a year and we have finally figured out that it just needed some additional gasket well we took it apart which also helped and then we had to add to the gasket to make it actually seal to the bottom of the boat and then we had a broken piece of stainless that was underneath the bolster on the helm seat that was actually hidden and that was like 400 bucks and you got to do it right we've had to replace one of the hot water heaters we have a leak in both of our fuel tanks it's small but that eventually will have to be addressed we had some leaking joints in the bow which we had to re-bed the princess seat to be able to stop that which we have we do have leaking windows which i think every boat has leaking windows our windlass had been changed out once by the charter company and unfortunately a week or two ago the windlass bolts just sheared off we have heard that that is very common in charter boats and because there's enormous amount of force on that but what did we discover when it fell apart and we had to oh we discovered that it had been repaired several times the first time they repaired it instead of putting it in a steel plate they used starboard to repair the windlass thank you grenada yeah thank you grenada our black water tank was leaking uh we noticed that it had been rubbing and it had rubbed a little bit of a hole in the fiberglass which we needed to repair urgently i'm telling you get some of that gorilla seal and patch uh weatherproof tape that's super thick that sealed that up with a little bit of sandpaper and acetone and a file brown did a great job replacing the teak on the swim ladder stair thankfully the only wood that we have on the boat we've had to replace the compass light which burned out long before we got the boat which of it was a day c trial we needed to do some bottom paint as well to protect the bottom of our boat and we had that done and also some blisters taken out yeah the bottom paint that they're going to put on this is going to be super cheap and i think they only put like one layer on ours because we really had a lot of stuff growing on it and they use this cheap seahawk stuff and ours is seahawk but it's biocop and it's working really well now but we've got two layers on it so that's something to look for and the last thing that we found was that our helm instruments had been pretty badly rusted when we had the lightning strike and actually pulled them out and started looking at them so we had to replace several of those because there's no helm enclosure right right so after all of that what type of advice let's wrap all that up yep so would we buy a charter boat again would you the answer is yes absolutely the positives far outweigh the negatives we come from the educational background we don't have unlimited funds the only way we could make this work is for us to live aboard full-time and the math just really worked out on this it was the wise choice but we do have some pieces of advice the first piece of advice we've already discussed which is to check your charter boat location and its reputation really important we should have never bought a boat out of grenada the second one is if you're particular about your boat about things being perfect looking really really beautiful you've got a little extra cash yeah don't do it don't buy a charter boat don't buy a private boat yep and you'll be good to go you have to have a very low threshold for frustration because you're gonna be you're gonna be fixing things all the time sure but that's boating in general and some people love to fix stuff so hey if you love to fix things a charter boat is a perfect gift for you all right the next piece of advice is make sure you get a good surveyor that is not in bed with the charter company we did not have a choice in st lucia there was only one surveyor on the entire island and we had to use him and i think he was fair but i also think that he has a very good relationship a little home cooking and so i think there were some things that were not done another piece of advice is get a list of phase out items and double check that they've done them they said oh we did this and we did that and then we found later they hadn't done the things that they said they did another piece of advice that we're not really sure what to do with or how to handle it would be a full engine assessment which is kind of difficult to do unless you take the whole engine apart and take a look at the seals and sometimes you just got to run your engine until you know what's wrong so right that's a good point that seat trowel is not enough to pick up like leaks and seals because they're going to clean that engine department up it's going to be squeaky clean the last piece of advice is pretty minor but it took us a couple of weeks to figure out the manuals for all of the systems on the boat we were not given a lot of things a lot of the manuals were old and we had to go through the or there were things previously replaced yes which was good in one way because we had to learn where things were and what we were dealing with not a bad thing but not having manuals is it really hurts you in the long run when things go you can find a lot of pdfs online where you can download quickly also yes print them out yes as long as you know what what model you're working with and you're going to use that leopard book so many times we the owner's book the owner's book so we hope you have found a lot of helpful information here and we will see you next week when we put the video together for the finances of a boat all right we love you guys appreciate you talk to you soon stay in touch bye