Surviving Winter Aboard

In the snowbound Northeast, someone, somewhere is watching ‘Captain Ron’ in a blizzard.

- Ali Wisch

Living aboard has its challenges, whether you do it full-time or part-time in the Caribbean or the North Pole—which, I imagine, is not too different from living aboard through a Boston winter.

I’ve lived aboard through two New England winters. The first, the notorious winter of 2014- 15, was a tremendous learning experience. The conditions were extremely harsh, my boyfriend, Phil, and I were new to the live aboard scene, and the boat belonged to someone else. (We were caretakers for a family that traveled to Costa Rica.) Plenty of things went wrong, but we learned a lot and developed a newfound appreciation for a lifestyle we would come to adopt permanently. Now, going into our third winter afloat, we’re finally starting to feel prepared.

The first thing we think about each fall is which shipyard or marina we will call home for the next six months. A lot of factors come into play when we make this decision. First, be sure to figure out the cost of electricity. Check the marina’s metered rate, or you might be signing up for a warm but expensive season, especially if you run electric heaters. We’ve seen everything from 15 cents a kilowatt hour to 32 cents a kilowatt hour.