Retirement on a Sailboat: Reality vs. Dream

When you start searching the internet for retirement options, “selling everything and living on a sailboat” seems to come up pretty often. Is it really an idyllic retirement and what is the reality of actually living on a sailboat in your later years?

For the last 14 years we’ve been living on our sailboat for at least four to six months every year. For us, the idea of selling everything and sailing into the sunset was not an option. Although we don’t work anymore, we still enjoy our church, community, family, volunteer work and hobbies, so the lifestyle of partially living on a boat suits us well. Based in South Florida makes sailing to the Bahamas, Cuba, Dry Tortugas, The Florida Keys and the Caribbean all within reasonably easy reach. This year our trip started in mid February with a sixteen day non-stop sailing to Grenada in the south Caribbean, from where we’ll slowly sail back up the chain until the first hurricane starts to chase us home. Overall we’ve sailed well over 10,000 nautical miles since 2011.

Although we both keep relatively fit and are blessed with very good health, I can honestly say that each year things get a tiny bit harder to do than the previous year, everything takes just that small little bit longer to do and although we still very much enjoy every day on the water, we realize and talk about it oftentimes that there will come a day when it might just be too difficult and even dangerous to do it by ourselves. There is always the option of hiring younger people to help, but that to us is definitely a very long time before we would even consider that.

So back to living on a boat in retirement. It obviously depends on what you want to do and where you want to go. If living on a boat, on a dock is what you are thinking of, I’m not sure what the reason for that would be. The cost in most cases would not be much less, if any, than living on land. There’s definitely more luxuries and conveniences on land than on a boat – even a luxury yacht.

When you start an active cruising lifestyle, I can see the benefits but also the caveats or difficulties. We’ve met people along the way whose dream it was to sail until they found a place where only organic food was sold and where the government was not corrupt. Our only comment was that the organic food was easy to find in any third world island; the Government issue: they would be sailing for a very long time.

If you start out by being realistic and not live in a dream world of everything is better elsewhere, you have a good chance of enjoying the lifestyle as long as you can physically do it. If you’re not happy now, living on a sailboat would probably not make you happy anyway.

Some of the benefits

• In my opinion the freedom you experience when cruising the world is unbeatable and almost unbelievable. Apart from visa restrictions there are few places you can dream about that you cannot actually go to. With the right preparation, most modest sized boats can go almost anywhere.

• Another benefit for me is the simplicity of life – your days are spent making sure you have enough battery power, searching for clean water so you can run the desalinator to have nice clean, pure drinking water, spotting a good coral head or rock to find a fresh fish for lunch or dinner, racing with your drink not to miss the sunset, doing some cooking, cleaning and boat maintenance.
• One of the biggest surprises for us and many other sailors, were the awesome people that you meet along the way. Also, in general people are much more active and eat much healthier than on land.

• We choose not to have a TV on board, but we do have Starlink for all our communications, streaming the odd program or movie and to choose how much “news” we need from the rest of the world.

Of course there are also a downside to living on a boat, especially for us frugal or prudent retirees. If you have unlimited amounts of money, we’re not on the same page and most of the negatives will probably not apply to you. But for the rest of us poor cruisers, here goes.

Potential downside to living on a boat

• The boat is in motion – ALWAYS! Some find it very uncomfortable and never get used to the motion, even while sitting on a dock. Others, like us, like the gentle rocking of the boat, but in some situations it can get very uncomfortable and even dangerous if you don’t hold on for dear life.

• Laundry is another issue that can get old very quick. On our boat, laundry is done mostly by hand and hung out in the sun to dry. I have a small container in which I put the smaller items as they need washing, I add the detergent and water, give it a few shakes every so often, and the following day gently wash it by hand in the sink and that is pretty effortless. Larger items like towels and sheets, will go into the shower or a larger bucket, water and detergent is added and then the old fashioned treading starts. I don’t mind doing it because it gives me a good workout and depending on how energetic I feel, I even get some cardio exercise out of it.

• The alternative is to load the laundry bags into the dinghy, take it ashore, carry it to the laundromat which is inevitably quite a distance from where your dinghy can be docked or beached. Then, if a machine is available, load up and wait – then wait for it to dry, fold it all neatly, pay a small fortune, carry it all back to the dinghy, ride back slowly with your precious clean laundry not to get it all soaked in salt water again, get it from the dinghy into the boat, then down below and then stowing it neatly. Either way, laundry is a pain on a boat.

There is obviously also the option to add a washing machine to your boat, but for me, it’s a waste of precious space.

• Provisioning can be a nightmare, but if you get the hang of it, it can be very rewarding and fun to think ahead and ensure that you feed your family healthy and delicious meals while miles away from land, a restaurant or a grocery store. I do lots of food preparation while on land like canning meats, stews, stroganoff, goulash, curries, and so on. Freeze-drying is our latest favorite because the nutritional value of the food is excellent compared to any other preservation method, the food looks good, tastes the same as freshly made, can be kept for up to twenty five years if properly sealed and weighs almost nothing. The trick is to figure out how much of what you will actually need and eat. We come home every year with loads of food that we just couldn’t finish. We do get better every year, but because we prefer the remote islands without any shops or even people, I’d rather have too much than too little. On our boat we are pretty well stocked – basically everything we would like or want on land, we have on the boat.

• Cooking on a boat can also present a problem, especially while sailing, because the boat normally heels a little bit (lying over to one side) which means the pots don’t want to sit still and you need some way to clamp them onto the stove. Boiling hot water or food can spill out while you’re cooking and that can be downright dangerous. A lot of people prepare light meals ahead of a passage but if you’re sailing for an extended time, that is not practical for the whole journey. This is where the canned stews come in very handy – you empty a bottle, heat it up on the stove or microwave and serve it over instant potatoes, bread or rice and you have an instant nutritious hot meal. The freeze dried meals, vegetables and even meats are working exceptionally well. You rehydrate what you want to eat, heat it up and viola! Instant meals without fuss, heat in the galley and cooking all day long. Most of the freeze-dried fruits are eaten without rehydrating, which gives it a nice crunch and the flavors of the fruit seems intensified many times – real treat without the effort of finding fresh fruit and then eating it before it goes bad.

• The weather is another issue that nobody can do anything about and nobody seems able to predict it for precisely where you are at that particular time. Sometimes the wind will be blowing hard constantly for days and completely out of season, and sometimes it will be raining for days on end when not expected at all. This sure does happen on land as well, but the difference with being on a boat is that the boat is moving much more than normal, a dinghy ride to shore to do something fun becomes uncomfortable and even dangerous and if there’s a leak somewhere in the boat, this is the time that you will really notice it:-)

• Boat work seems to never stop and as the old saying goes “owning a boat is just doing dirty work in an idyllic location”. It really doesn’t matter where you are, but if you’re anchored amongst other sailors, you will always see someone doing some project on their boat. Things break all the time – the ocean with it’s saltwater and humid environment is extremely harsh on any kind of metal, electronics and electrical systems. Small repairs (and sometimes big ones) are inevitable on any boat – new or old – in the long run, so be prepared to work on the boat regularly.

• Although family and friends are very important to us, we do miss out on many occasions – birthdays, parties, engagements, graduations, and even funerals!

• Dampness and mold can very easily become a major struggle on a boat. If you sail in the tropics, the humidity alone is enough to make most things feel damp most of the time, and off course, dark closets and lazarettes that are constantly damp is the ideal breeding ground for mold. Our hatches and portholes are open as often as it can be and we rotate the contents of the lockers and lazarettes while we wipe everything down with a vinegar solution from time to time.

• The toilet or head as it is called on a boat can also be something to get used to. The automatic heads are a blessing as long as you have sunshine and enough battery power. We have a manual head in our forward bathroom as a backup, but manually pumping the contents is not something I choose to get used to. Some boats have a “wet” bathroom where your toilet gets wet when you shower – another thing to get used to. Also, nothing that hasn’t gone through your body is allowed in a marine toilet, so you have some stinky paper to deal with as well.

I realize that the list of difficulties of living on a boat seems much longer than the upside but I specifically want to make people aware of the reality of living on a boat in your later years. If you don’t really love the lifestyle with all it’s challenges, I strongly suggest that you look into alternative ways to spend your golden years on. It can be the most amazing time of your life like it is for us, or it can become your biggest nightmare ever.

Try to join someone who is actually living on a boat the size that you will be able to comfortably afford, maintain, store and handle if you decide to retire on a boat, and cruise with them for a week or two to get a feeling of what it is really like – not what the youngsters on YouTube make it out to be:-)

Mama-Wana offers opportunities for retirees who want to test the waters – send us a message and we’ll give you details of where we are and what dates we have available. We don’t teach sailing or diving, but just a taste of what real cruising is all about on a modest sailboat. Off course you will experience the ways we do it, have lots of time for stories, questions and discussions and lots of fun so come join us!

Happy retiring… until next time!