Paradise Found

We are wrapping up the week in the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park. The Young Cruisers Association and SeaPeople hosted a Floatchella, including a boat raft up and float down the natural lazy river through Shroud Cay.

We took a long weekend to enjoy some of the festivities and explore this incredible island. Tom has been getting in lots of wing foiling, and we perfected the dinghy rescue technique when he’s done and needs to get back to the big boat.

This place is absolutely stunning. Just when you think you’ve seen the most incredible beaches and clearest water in the world, the Bahamas serves up another one.

It’s hard to believe we’ve already been in the Bahamas for a month.

Since we often get asked how we afford to live on a boat, we decided to track and share some of the financial details of cruising in a place like the Bahamas. The first month includes customs and immigration fees, dog costs, food, diesel and some other random expenses.

If you're not already subscribed, you will need to enter your email address to view the page linked above.

To sum it all up, it’s exactly the same as anyone affords to live. We budget to balance our income and our expenses. Our expenses just tend to include more boat parts than yours.

Our day-to-day living expenses are actually less on our catamaran than they were living in a house in Florida. We no longer have a mortgage or car payments. We rarely eat out and choose free anchorages over paid marinas or moorings every chance we get. Our biggest, consistent expense is our boat insurance, which is about $500 each month.

Our expenses are also not always consistent. Some months, we have to buy a lot of expensive parts. Other months, we don’t. It’s not nearly as predictable as house projects in that way.

Some months (like this last one) we spend more on diesel than we’d like because we can’t always take advantage of great weather days with our work schedules. If we waited for the weather and work schedules to line up for great sailing, we wouldn’t get very far. Sometimes motor-sailing is the only option. 

It’s important to note that there are people out here doing the same thing we are on completely different boats and budgets. We certainly don’t have it all figured out but have found a good balance for us.

Hope you find this helpful. Let us know in the comments if there’s anything else you want to see or hear about.