Watching Delos made me realize that the actual mix of activities in this lifestyle is about 50% boat maintenance and tinkering, 40% sitting at anchor somewhere looking for things to do, and 10% actually sailing the boat.
The Delos folks have some presentations on their channel about the finances of it and the #1 message is basically “this only works financially if you do all the work yourself.”
My takeaway is that it seems like a fun lifestyle for people who like to tinker with things constantly, but it’s maybe not as relaxing as it seems from YouTube videos (which are edited, after all).
Well known saying: "Cruising is repairing your boat in exotic places." Getting replacement parts in exotic places tends to be expensive and takes a lot of time and energy. The more "modern" your boat is, the more expensive and difficult it is to repair.
As you note, most of the cruising time is spent at anchor. A lot of time spent at anchor is dealing with provisioning because everything takes a dinghy ride (first pump out the water and maybe fix the outboard) and walking to the (small) store to buy from what they have on hand.
Yeah, Delos are pretty open about there being a lot of maintenance, and video editing (~80 hours work total per episode), they just don't show that most of the time because people (like me) want to see the other stuff.
As a boat owner, a lot of this is true. My boat is on the hard right now and the yard will handle some of the stuff that needs fixing, but I'm doing a lot myself for two reasons:
1. It costs me less real money
2. I enjoy it.
I'm a CTO, I spend my life in meetings, spreadsheets, documents, and sometimes a text editor, terminal or database console. On Friday I am heading to the boat with a friend. We will drink some beer, then on Saturday we will break out the spanners and service the seacocks, replace some interior trim we took out last time, fix the cockpit manual bilge pump and a few other things.
Honestly, this is the stuff I've been looking forward to more than anything in the last two weeks since I was last there.
If you want relaxing, charter a boat, pay a skipper, or get a hotel, no judgement :) I've never really been able to relax for more than a few hours without wanting to do something though, and sailing, or the inevitable maintenance, is a really happy thing for me to do.
Of course another advantage of doing this stuff yourself is that you can afford to hang around the Bahamas, or sail around the world, something that you can't do so well if you aren't willing to do maintenance yourself.
The Delos folks have some presentations on their channel about the finances of it and the #1 message is basically “this only works financially if you do all the work yourself.”
My takeaway is that it seems like a fun lifestyle for people who like to tinker with things constantly, but it’s maybe not as relaxing as it seems from YouTube videos (which are edited, after all).