Part time family cruising options
Hi Cruisers,
We are a couple from Western Australia with 2 young girls. We own 2 commercial sailing catamarans - a 55ft - (we’ve extended to 60ft) crowther and a 43 ft Schionning.
Our boats work most days of our tourist season ( mid March until mid October). We would love to go cruising but as we are limited in the months we can go ( ie our “off season” of November until mid feb) we are unsure of the best way to go.
A couple of options are - 1) buy a boat OS and lay it up somewhere in feb every year when we leave it * the biggest dilemma here is being away for over 8 months of the year
2) buy a boat in a charter fleet * possibly a little too inflexible for us
3) look for a long term charter arrangement -does anyone know where we could even start looking for this?? The idea would be to charter for between 4-12 weeks.
We have run a fountaine in turkey/Greece and after the charters the owner asked us if we wanted to live on her to save him the marina fees whilst the boat was not in charter- I wonder if there is anyone out there interested in making some money when they aren’t using their cat and saving $ by having us look after and pay the boats outgoings whilst onboard?
We run a busy tourism company in WA and also lease a 55ft power vessel for 7 months of the year so are very comfortable with some sort of lease arrangement.
In our past off seasons we have lived On our crowther ( the kids are used to boat life) we also maintain our own vessels and both have had commercial masters/ captains and engineering tickets for the past 15-20 years.
We would like to spend time in the Caribbean and South Pacific.
If anyone has any thought we would love to hear them! Thanks heaps ⛵️
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