Hello sailors, I just wanted to share my hopes to one day be living in a sailboat off grid. I was wondering if anyone else has done this, or any recommendations anyone might have? I have read some books on the matter, such as Get Real, Get Gone, and found it very informative. At this stage, when I cannot leave land for at least a few more years, I am thinking of getting a smaller sailboat to practice with and do some small trips.
My best advice would be to get adept at the maintenance side of things. Sailboats live in harsh environments and will almost always have something breaking on you. Learn basic electrical systems, engine maintenance and line/sail maintenance.
You can do all of this before having a boat just watching YouTube and working on electrical in your house, your car/transport engine and buying some cheap off cuts of canvas and rope.
The better you are at fixing things, the better off you’ll be at living in your off grid paradise.
For practice: You can reach out to your sailing community and ask to participate in some races. In my experience boats are always looking for consistent crew members.
I’ve lived on a sailboat for weeks at a time, and I know people who live on a sailboat fulltime. What exactly are you hoping to achieve by living “off the grid” exactly? I can tell you that there’s no way you’re going to be completely independent. You will have to go to shore to provision, for instance.
Getting a smaller sailboat is a good idea. Sailing and being somewhat independent requires a pretty huge amount of knowledge, but you can develop it all a little as you go. Simply the art and sport of making a boat move under sail where you want it to go is a pretty big adventure, and then on top of that you have boat maintenance, and then on top of that you have all the stuff you have to do to live not off-the-grid but partially disconnected from it.
Once you start going on trips or trying to live aboard you will get a very intimate understanding of exactly how many kilowatt hours of electricity you need, how many gallons of clean freshwater, etc.
Yea I understand you cannot be fully off grid, we just want to be able to move around with our little home, and see the world before it collapses. The plan is to set up some small passive income and then reduce our expenditures as much as possible to make living on board without working a full time job feasible.
