Cruising Costs - June 2016 - Sea Biscuit Sailing

You’ve quit your jobs to sail around the Bahamas and Caribbean for a year or two? Cool. You must be millionaires!

Not even close.

In this new life of ours, we’re actually quite frugal. The more cash we can save, the longer we get to stay out and play. It’s a pretty good incentive, no?

To give you an idea of how we spend our money, I’ll be sharing a monthly itemized review of our spending and my thoughts on our financial burn in general.

Summary of expenses for June 2016 – St. Martin, St. Barts, Nevis, Guadeloupe, Les Saintes, Martinique

Grand total: $ 2,891.00

Biggest ticket items
The bulk of this month’s expenses was accumulated during our stay in St. Martin, where we made use of the wonderful grocery stores, restaurants, and boat supply stores. We also took advantage of the affordable French wines available here and stocked up on enough to get us through the summer. We topped off our diesel tanks and jerry cans – and hope that we will not need to refuel until the end of hurricane season (we’ll see how that goes).

I’ve also included two deposits that total approximately $500 – a deposit on a marina slip in Grenada, and payment for the Air BnB I’ve reserved for our visit to New York City – both for the month of August. Brian and I disagree over whether these expenses should hit the budget in June or in August. Because it’s money debited this month, I say it hits this month.

Looking forward
We lost two big ticket items in the final days of June: our 6 month old 8HP Yamaha 2-stroke outboard engine was stolen, and an iPhone 6 that was left on deck one rainy night. We are using a backup phone at the moment, but will likely want to get another device so we have a backup for our backup – either another iPhone or an additional iPad, which we use for navigation. This will likely hit the budget in August, when we visit the US.

The theft of our outboard engine will hit next month’s budget hard, so we’ll be working to keep other costs down in July. It is unclear how much will be covered by our insurance (with our deductible, it may be very little), and it’s not likely we’ll get a deal as good as the one we got in Nassau, Bahamas this time around.

Itemized expenses – June 2016 – St. Martin, St. Barts, Nevis, Guadeloupe, Les Saintes, Martinique

Grand total: $ 2,891.00

Cost group	amount	notes
boat parts/maintenence	350	hardware store, island water world
booze	250	wine
cleaning supplies
clothing	200
customs fees	58
diesel	250	St Martin
eating out	410	Grand Case, Marigot Bay, Nevis, The Saints
fishing supplies
groceries	600	provisioning in St. Martin, St. Barts , Guadeloupe, Martinique, bakeries, etc.
gasoline
laundry	40	Shrimpy’s
insurance
marinas
miscellaneous	550	Rental Car, Marigot Bay, 3 nights Air BnB in NYC, deposit on marina in Grenada
entertainment
mooring balls	40	Nevis, the saints
pet supplies
phone/data	100	wi-fi Marigot, Delrome, Spotify, t-mobile hotspot, itunes, Audible.com
toiletries	18	st martin
toys/games
trash
water	50	300 gallons RO

*grand total*	2891