>I am trying to get a sense of the cost of trawler ownership. I have seen some rule-of-thumb percentages (such as 10% of the purchase price per year) bandied about in various places but these strike me as being too vague to be of any real value. People have created spreadsheet-type models to use to track ownership costs, and I think some of them have been posted here from time to time. The problem is that there are so many variables in determining ownership costs for a specific boat that it's often difficult to relate the costs associated with one boat to the costs that would be incurred with another boat, even if it was the same make, model, and year. That is why people tend to generalize on the ten-percent-per-year figure as it's been proven over time to be reasonably accurate. To cite one small example, moorage costs in the Puget Sound area vary dramatically within a 100-mile distance. In and around Seattle, moorage costs can be extremely high--- as much as $8 to $10 a foot and even more in places. Yet 85 miles north, in Bellingham where we keep our boat, moorage is about $5.00 a foot. Of course the real variable is going to be maintenance, repair, and replacement costs, and these are very difficult to forecast. I changed the raw water impeller in the first of our two Ford Lehman 120s the other month but found the Jabsco pump leaked when I started the engine. Water was seeping out from behind the impeller housing, which meant the shaft seal was bad. These pumps can be rebuilt, I didn't have time to do it, so we had our local diesel shop remove the pumps from both engines to overhaul them. They found the drive unit for one of the pumps had a badly worn shaft. The drive unit was designed by Lehman and made for them, and they haven't been available new for decades. They can be rebuilt, but the rebuilds are pretty unreliable because of the poor initial design of the drive unit. The best solution is to switch to a new Johnson pump. So we had new Johnson pumps installed on both engines and kept the one good drive unit and Jabsco pump as a spare. So here was a maintenance task that I anticipated would cost nothing since we already had the spare Jabsco impellers that turned into a $1,700 pump replacement project. I could have saved a couple hundred dollars by ordering and installing the pumps myself but I didn't have the time and we had to use the boat the week after we first discovered the pump drive problem. So you can perhaps see why coming up with an accurate advance estimate of ownership costs can be so difficult. It's easy enough to track your own costs once you have the boat and are spending money on it. But using someone else's figures may not have much relevance to what you'll end up spending on your own boat. ______________________________ C. Marin Faure GB36-403 "La Perouse" Bellingham, Washington