What a boat is actually for

Every broker has the conversation. The client wants to know whether to buy, the spreadsheet says charter, and the client buys anyway. The spreadsheet is not wrong. It is answering a different question from the one being asked.

The costs, without the optimism

A yacht costs eight to twelve per cent of its purchase price a year to keep, before depreciation and before finance. On a 30 metre boat bought at nine million euro that is roughly 800,000 a year, and it does not fall much if you use the boat less.

Crew, five to seven on a 30 m

380,000 to 520,000 euro including social costs, rotation and food

Berth, home port, annual

55,000 to 140,000 euro depending on the marina and the length

Insurance

0.6 to 1.1 per cent of hull value

Refit and maintenance reserve

2 to 4 per cent of value a year, spent unevenly and always more than planned

Fuel and cruising costs

60,000 to 200,000 euro for a normal season

Class, flag, survey, management

40,000 to 90,000 euro

The break-even, and why it does not settle the argument

Against chartering an equivalent boat at high-season rates, ownership starts to make arithmetic sense somewhere around ten weeks of annual use. Almost nobody reaches ten weeks. The honest average across owners of boats in this size range is six to seven, and a large part of that is two long stretches in July and August with the same guests.

So on the numbers, the answer is charter, and it stays charter until the boat is being used at a level that most owners never reach. Every broker knows this and most will say it.

Nobody has ever bought a boat because the arithmetic worked. They buy it because the boat is theirs on a Tuesday in October when nobody is asking.

A captain of twenty-two years, on the only reason he has ever found convincing

What ownership actually buys

Continuity of crew, which over five years becomes a group of people who know how your family takes coffee and which bay is right in a north-easterly. A boat set up for the way you use it: the tender you want, the wine you drink, the beds made up the way you sleep. And the ability to go on Thursday because the weather turned good, which is the thing a charter can never give you.

These are not small. They are just not financial, and the mistake is trying to justify them financially, which leads to the fractional schemes, the charter-back arrangements and the tax structures that convert a pleasure into an administration.

The middle way that mostly works

Own something smaller than the boat you charter. A 20 to 24 metre boat with two or three crew, kept where you actually are, used forty days a year for weekends and long lunches, running at 180,000 to 300,000 a year. Then charter a large boat for the two big weeks with everybody on board.

This gets you the Thursday, the crew who know you and the low commitment, and it puts the expensive weeks on somebody else's balance sheet. The reason it is not more common is that it does not photograph as one decision.