For over a year now, I’ve kept a detailed cost log for our yacht project. There are two questions I’ve tried to find answers to. Firstly, what does sailing a new Hanse 388 really cost? Secondly, if I compare this to chartering costs, would it have been less costly to rent a boat than to buy one— especially given our short sailing season in Finland!
Conventional wisdom says that it’s always cheaper to charter than to own, but I have my doubts.
If you want to sail to the Exuma islands in the Bahamas, there aren’t very many chartering companies offering bareboat charters to do so. In fact we could find only two: Moorings operating on the north side of New Providence, on Paradise Island, and Navtours (member of Dream Yacht Charter) located on the southeast side of the island, operating out of Palm Cay Marina. We chose the latter, and this is a post about our experiences.
We thought we had anchored in the perfect location to get a peaceful night, but boy were we wrong! The boat bounced all over the place and we ended up having the most restless night of the whole trip. Ok, part of the restlessness was probably due to everything nearing its end, but still, it wasn’t a very good night! We got up slightly more tired than we were used to, and started preparing ourselves and the boat for the last leg of our trip: sailing back to Nassau.
Wind in the hair and smiles on our faces we set sails again, heading back north toward our final destination before returning to Nassau: Ship Channel Cay.
In the Bahamas the difference between high and low tide is about a meter of water. There are plenty of shallow places with sandy bottoms, and when the tide goes out, a few of these are exposed as “popup beaches” in the middle of the sea. They seem like absolutely magical places, so we set out to look for one!
Adjusting to the Bahamian time zone (Finland is +7 hours) was quite funny. When it got dark (after about six o’clock) we got tired and went to sleep. When the sun rose again, about twelve hours later, we got up. I never get this much sleep at home, so it was actually quite refreshing!
Charlotte felt better! It was the absolutely best morning gift after an excruciating yesterday of seasickness. The morning sun was shining and Charlotte was sunshining. The perfect day to just relax and take a look around at our amazing surroundings.
Provisioning done (lots of jugs of water, plenty of dry food, toast, cheese, coffee, weird sweets and obviously some sparkling wine for New Year’s). Water and fuel tanks filled, batteries charged. A general idea of where we were headed and which lines to pull to get the sails up. “Ready, captain?”, asked the charter company staff member as he handed me the last remaining docking line. And off we went!
Our smaller adventure inside the bigger adventure is getting closer.
