BAREBOAT YACHT CHARTERING: The Complete Guide to “Off the Charts” Adventures

Since 2007, we have chartered bareboat yachts seventeen times. Many of these rips were for more than a week. Due to the Corona Virus hysteria, we did not plan a trip in 2020. We are still on the water, as part owners of an 80-foot yacht. It is not
the same as the bareboat charters but having a uniformed crew taking care of us is not bad. The bareboat charter trips were each a trip of a lifetime. I only wish we had started years earlier.
Early Boating
Most of my adult life, I have dreamed of sailing off to other lands and adventures. At one point in my thirties, I even planned to retire early with an ocean-going boat and take off. A couple things got in the way of this dream, such as family, house, bills, obligations, and not the least of which was I got seasick. This dream stayed only a dream for a long, long time. My interest in boating began when I was about 25 years old with my boss, who owned a homemade boat on the Sacramento
River. That interest continued all my adult life. Groups of couples would travel down the river to a restaurant and cocktails. The evening would end with a moonlight cruise back up the river. Boating is such a slow pace that no matter how hectic life can be, once you leave the dock you are on boat time. When I was twenty-eight, my boating friend (now my best friend) and one other buddy decided to build a boat of our own. We bought a 35-foot steel lifeboat off an old hospital ship in the San Francisco Bay area. It was over twelve feet wide and tipped the scales at over 10,000 pounds. We had it hauled to Sacramento and put it in a barn we had rented. Over the course of the next two years, we converted it into a diesel trawler. It was a bit rough in places but perfect to cruise the Sacramento Delta. During construction, we had talked of sailing it to Mexico. After a few rolling trips out of San Francisco Bay, those Mexico ambitions stayed only a dream. I did take it out under the Golden Gate twice to say we could do it. Taking twelve-foot ocean swells in a homemade boat soon got me headed back to the relative safety of San Francisco Bay. It was not long before job transfers separated the partners,
and it became necessary to split up the partnership. I sold my interest in the boat when I was 34 years old and purchased a 35-foot, fiberglass houseboat, which I owned for over 30 years. The boat was roomy, safe, and comfortable for a family of six with a cat and several kittens keeping us company. I got plenty of docking and anchoring opportunities during these years.
United States Power Squadron
During the years we worked on the diesel trawler, I began spending time learning boating. A friend who was an avid boater got me into the U.S. Power Squadron. his organization had been around for well over a hundred years. They offered boating
classes on a number of subjects. They also promoted proper boating etiquette and tradition. After successfully completing their introductory class, I joined the organization. I was totally into boating by this time, taking almost all the classes they offered. I soon got into teaching their classes. Over the next eight years, I taught all the seamanship, piloting, navigation, and even celestial navigation classes. In teaching classes, I had to learn everything, so I could answer questions.
This period of my boating life gave me a solid background in boating rules and operations. This experience would eventually help me to achieve a Coast Guard captain's license and operate larger yachts on the open ocean.
Mid-Life Boating
In the middle third of my life, I finally made it to Mexico. It was not sailing down the Pacific Ocean on a private yacht, but in an RV towing a dune buggy and a pump-up boat. For many years, my wife and I spent several weeks annually in Baja Mexico, on the Sea of Cortez. (AKA, the Gulf of California) These times in Baja Mexico were weeks spent living on the beach and taking a small boat out into the Sea of Cortez to catch dinner with a spear gun. We visited most of the area from Santa Rosalia to Cabo San Lucas. This is a fantastic area with wonderful people and clear, warm water.
During our years renting charter yachts we did two charters out of La Paz in Baja Sur. (South Baja California) We also rented a 42-foot river yacht on a weeklong trip down the Saône River in France. There is not much in my boating adventures I would have changed, other than to start sooner in life and get on the water more frequently.