A few comments on Scott's post about the costs of cruising: If you spend $500,000 or $1,000,000 for the boat--that is money which is out of your "investment pool"--We have been averaging about 13% a year on our investments--or a million dollars this means $130,000 a year. This is income lost if you have a million dollars in the boat. If you pay $500,000 for the boat, it means that you will then be putting $65,000 more a year away. I figure inflation at 10% a year. I have always figured that--and it has stood me well. I know what the government says. But I also know that the US dollar has lost about 30% of its value against many currencies in the last several years--and that is a form of inflation for cruisers! There is also an assumption that you will be able to sell the boat for what you paid for it. In our experience there it is more likely that you will "loose" more the more expensive the boat is. In a few cases we have sold boats for more than we paid for them--but these were boats which we purchased very in expensively, and did lots of work on--including several complete restorations--which in themselves cost money. We also did our cruising while we were able to do it physically. I am in my 70's and not able to cross oceans or perhaps even do long coastal cruises because of health problems. So we did our cruising when in our 40's and 50's. In this time of life, we did not touch our retirement savings, nor did we take away from what was saved for our children's college and grad school funds. Our cruising funds were purely from sale of real estate and were calculated to last us 4 to 5 years--and then we would go back to work. We also "stair cased" our retirement funds--that is after we actually retired, started off with minimal investments, and pensions, then added Social Security and finally in the 70's added our personal pension funds. There are still funds which we have not touched, and we hope to not utalize. This philosophy assumed that we would go back to work after cruising and put more aside for retirement, use the funds from sale of the boat, to buy more real estate, and be able to save more in the future--as well as be working when the children were in college/grad school. We always ate on the local economy--remember that most of the world lives on a few hundred dollars a month--if not less. We ate local foods--and avoided "American foods". We spoke Spanish and French, so were able to shop fairly easily, and ask how to prepare local dishes. We ate out occasionally, but usually at local--not tourist restraunts. We did not consume much liquor--mostly local wines and beer. We found that food was considerably less than in the US--You can stock up in food in the major cities in Central America. Sort of like--Folks eat there also!. We rarely stayed in marinas--and marinas can put the budget up very rapidly. Even on the Gulf Coast some Marinas are $3.00 a foot currently--down in South Florida--the fees are much higher. You can pay that or more in Central America--or you can anchor across the bay for nothing. We had a range of over 3000 miles, so we could pick and choose where we purchased fuel. We documented our vessels--and made sure that they were not taxed as we traveled. I would see no reason to have a vessel registered in a state--in fact documentation probably makes clearance easier. Also we almost never used an agent--there were a couple exceptions--such as where one Honduran port captain was at his mistresses for the afternoon, and we had to pay an agent a little to find him. We did our own Canal transit paper work--and in doing this, met the chief pilot and were invited to spend an afternoon as his guest. We paid no boat insurance--we could not get it for what we were doing with a two person crew. I was willing to take a chance; I was experienced; I had very good ground tackle and purchased (for the time) the latest navigation gear--but had already crossed oceans with a sextant. What bothers me a little about Scott's "budget" is the Maintance. We always had $25,000 in a Maintance fund. We never had to use all of it, but things can go wrong. The boat we started with our our European adventure, was newer than Scott's--and we lost the transmission, lost the genset, plus had some other failures--plus the haul outs etc. I suspect that $3600 a year may be average for maintance, (ours was more than that 25 years ago) but there is a very good chance it could be $20,000 a year Basically all of this shows that there are indeed different ways to look at all of this. Regards, Bob Austin