Circumnavigating on the Pennies that Scotsmen Throw Away
I don’t know much about the global economy or tariffs—but I’m a wealth of knowledge on how to sail around the world repeatedly on the pennies that Scotsmen throw away. Plus, how to morph derelict vessels into offshore sailing yachts.
My first vessel didn’t have an engine or a mast or any sails when I purchased it in 1968 for $200. A couple of years later I powered it down the Mighty Miss to the Big Easy—and sailed it to Key Wasted to mooch off the conchs there (both above and below the water).
The next vessel I built from scratch. Its 36-foot hull cost me $600 in materials. We ocean sailed her for 18 years—until Hurricane Hugo, a Cat 4, took her in 1989.
For two weeks I was boatless—and philosophically rudderless—until I purchased an awash Hughes 38 with a huge hole at the turn of the bilge on her port side. I smeared her with dried snot—and sailed her around the world twice, at an initial cost of 3 cents a mile. (Yes, you read that correctly.)
My current vessel, a very posh, fully tricked-out Wauquiez 43, which cost us 56K. If purchased new today, it would cost 600-800 thousand. Instead of paying that, we swung a new Perkins engine aboard from our main boom—and sailed her around the world 1.5 times. While her current cost figures out to about a buck mile. This is still not too shabby, considering we (and our daughter and grandkids) continue to leave the mooring as a family a couple of times every month. And, after 12 blissful years of cruising the world, all her major components still work. We could leave across the Indian Ocean for America tomorrow—but why take such a vast demotion in quality of our lives?
So, what I’m about to tell you aren’t haphazard guesses. They’re the result of 65 years of living aboard and ocean sailing.
Here’s the truth of it: The boats (just containers of air, really) aren’t the obstacle to cruising, they are its solution. And yet the boats aren’t overly important, it is the cruise, the blue water passage, that makes a sailor a sailor.
Sailors wearing $5,000 worth of gear and standing on the deck of a multimillion dollar yacht are a dime a dozen. Sailors with an ocean or two in their rearview mirror are rare. Especially those with empty pockets and wide grins.
Here’s how sail both cheaply and safely—because these concepts have to go hand in hand in order to survive.
Rule #1: Don’t do what the rich guy on the boat next to you does. Don’t. If he buys you a drink, don’t buy him one back. If he attempts to buy you a second drink, don’t allow him to. If he insists, leave.
You’re not for sale, you’re for sail, right?
…and you’re nobody’s boy!
A guy in the ‘70s bought us a $700 meal in a French country. We one-upped him by cooking him an even more fabulous meal aboard, which I’m sure he remembers to this day.
Yes, we repaid him—but within the confines of our own coin, not his.
Avoid marinas—they are marine collection zones for sailors with too much money and not enough sense.
Don’t rent cars. Don’t take taxis—except in Cochin, Indian, where the max taxi fare was 12 cents within the city limits while we were there.
Instead, take buses and meet the locals. Walk—that’s right, walk with your legs. Crazy? Call it exercise, if you want. Lug a propane tank to be refilled if you don’t want people to know you’re a health nut.
Don’t pay needlessly for hospitals nor doctors. You can easily sail to islands with free health care. Hell, the health care where I’m at in SE Asia isn’t merely cheap, it’s far superior to most Western nations.
Sail to cheap places to haul out—then only stay on the hard a week or so. Better yet, sail to somewhere with tides and poor folk—and ask where the free tide-piles that you lean against to go out on the tide are. (Often in, say, New Zealand, there’s an informal list—just put in your name and wait.)
Have sex often—great cardo! Slimming! This is an extremely affordable activity, especially for young married couples who want to stay married. Plus, this simple, Biblically-approved act can avoid long, expensive counseling sessions and even aid in putting divorce lawyers out of business.
Avoid ship chandleries—a major source of cardiac arrest immediately after asking, “…how much?” We often check out the local fishing supply places first.
Also avoid all the cyber-subscription-crap-o-la—this is just an exploitative company that figures if you’re stupid enough to buy their product once, then you’re probably stupid enough to keep rebuying it every month.
A lot of sailors are discarding their SSB radios in hopes of shoring up yet another failing business of Elon’s. We went the opposite way—video-taping ourselves deep-sixing our SatPhone (and sending a copy to the company that insisted I bring it so they could yell at contact me).
…no, they never responded to the mid-ocean video—which was fine with me!
Anyway, Starlink is a perfectly-expensive way to call your mommy, but experienced offshore sailors want to speak to the vessel next to them (or the rescue boat coming towards them)—not their mommies.
Eat what the locals eat. Or, to put it another way, take a break from the preservatives and micro-plastics that are killing you and your birth rate by lodging in your body. If you sail into Sudan, Madagascar, or Tuvalu as we have—and you only have $500 in a sock under your pillow… at least you’ll be sure that you have enough money to buy food for the next year or three.
Just because I’m frugal doesn’t mean I’m cheap and unwilling to pay my fair share. Not at all. Before we left America, and later, Australia, we went to a fishing supply store and talked its owner into supplying us with thousands of various-sized fishhooks at cost.
Fishhooks are still extremely valuable in the Third World.
In Chicago, where I was born, we also purchased crack vials (ask the kids hanging around on the corner re: where to buy) then filled them with full-stink perfume from a bulk supplier.
Odiferous fishermen in the poorest of countries will trade almost anything for these. They usually demand two, one for the wifey and other for the ‘nit noy’ (or smaller, younger wife, i.e. mistress)
In the Philippines, the professional divers want dive masks—since the dive masks they make from the bottom of plastic quart Coke bottles aren’t too clear.
Yes, we carry a sack of reading glasses everywhere we go. Many of our destinations only have one pair for the whole island, say 800 people or so. (Yes, they pass the pair around on a schedule.)
Of course, there comes a point where you can’t cut back anymore. This is when you have to go on the hustle for the Ole Yankee Dollar.
If storm-bound and bored, my wife Carolyn often bakes loaves of bread, which we then distribute around the harbor (while piping hot!) to make friends.
Rich people can afford to not have friends—poor people cannot.
We know a number of cruising boats, mostly French, where the wife dinghies around the harbor in the late afternoon to take orders—then delivers the still-warm croissants and baguettes at dawn the following day.
Is it work? Yes, but baking in Paradise is a lot more fun than baking in Paris—and more profitable too.
The French are very good at this creative-work stuff. Take the cruising family that anchors under a bridge, passes out fliers, then do acrobatic routines and romantic plays from their rig while their two children walk through the crowd with upside down umbrellas to collect the cash.
We’ve seen this family many times across the Pacific and Indian Ocean. They told us that they were making too much money to return ashore! (Their modest boat gleamed.)
One grease monkey from Great Britain has a storm cloth with his vessel’s name on one side sign—and an advertisement for his mechanic services on the other. When sailors pass by in their dinghy, he flips it from the vessel’s names to Jack Tarr of All Trades as an inter-harbor advertisement.
Let’s pause and take a second to consider the legal and moral complexities of working as you sail. Is it legal and moral for a foreign yacht to crowd into a dock where local boats, who follow local rules, regs and pay local taxes, are competing against each other for daysails?
No and no.
Is it legal and moral for the same vessel to charter at a remote resort, at the request of its owner—an isle totally without any suitable local vessels offering their services? No, technically; and yes, in reality.
And the practical, everyday answer is this: I’ve never heard of an American sailor working abroad being arrested or fined if they immediately apologized and stopped upon request. Of course, a few ignorant souls shoot their finger at the brown man with the badge, and those idiots should be arrested and charged with… with unmitigated arrogance, if nothing else. (I fear that, as America increasingly abuses visitors, American travelers will be similarly treated.)
A lot of folks fired from Silicon Valley, for being total idiots, are now well-respected cyber heroes in various resorts of the Indian Ocean—merely by deleting all the porn on a computer and defragging the disk per MS’s instruction. GENIUS!
Dream of sailing to furthest corners of the Seven Seas and staying for a year or two–but the only thing working on your boat in your watermaker? Fine! Five-gallon jugs of drinking water are a very precious (and expensive) commodity in the Outer Isles of Timbuktu.
Many boaters love to eat fish but don’t like to clean them—especially in places like Chagos where, if you can’t fill your dinghy with fish in two hours, you’re doing something wrong. (Hint: bring numerous filleting knives of German steel.)
Speaking of Chagos, about once a week the swift currents around former palm plantations erode the beach, causing palm trees to fall into the water. The result is fresh heart-of-palm being only a few machete-chops away. (We’ve even canned heart-of-palm!)
Here’s a truism from circumnavigator David Wegman of A Frig’n Queen: No yachtsmen ever starved to death while sailing around the world.
True. Staying alive is easy-peasy. The real problem is keeping your vessel maintained. And the solution to that is simple as well. Just don’t have all the goofy marine crap like the sailor anchored next to you—don’t be a crackhead of marine electronics. This will save you both money and frustration—not only by avoiding the initial cost of the gear but by avoiding carrying spares and paying for FedEx because those spares were water-damaged by the time you actually needed them.
Yes, times are tough—but tough times make for tough people.
Even better, toughness is a priceless commodity in the coming strife American Way of Life.
Let’s put it another way: Is it nice to have your chart, your radar, and your forward scanning depth sounder able to flick instantly from nav-to-porn mode? Sure. Is it truly necessary; did Joshua Slocum or Bernard Moitessier have that feature? No, not that we know of.
We still have choices, you and I. If you own a modest boat and know how to sail her. Your choice in the coming Apocalypse can be as stark as shivering a long, chilly soup line in NYC or having more fish than you could ever possibly eat in the Maldives.
Harsh? Yes. Too harsh? Maybe, but I doubt it.
I’m not sure what you’ll decide, dear reader—but I am damn sure what I decided many decades ago on the evening of April 4th, 1968—and have never, not-for-one-single-second, regretted.
Good luck!
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