Home Port : Boatniks Trade Four Walls for Mobility, Coziness and a Bay View

How’s this for a trade-off:

Give up all of your furniture, roomy showers, conventional flushing toilets, washer and dryer, designer kitchen, deep-pile carpet, knickknacks, yard, garage, most of your clothes and the comfort of right angles.

In return, you get mobility, coziness and a bay view.

To about 150 independent Orange County residents, this sounds like a perfectly good deal. They have gladly made the trade for the freedom, albeit somewhat Spartan, of living aboard a boat.

They make their homes in the yacht harbors of Orange County, living out a life that most landlocked people have surely dreamed about at one time or another. To the dreamers, such a life might seem idyllic, carefree and unfettered, a chance to spend their days at a kind of personal Club Med, where long pants and shoes are considered formal and the seals and dolphins are your neighbors.

For the actual boatniks, however, life tends toward the practical, sometimes almost mercilessly so. In their buoyant homes, they face a laundry list of particular situations, chores and problems that can dull the gloss of the nautical life, at least in the eyes of landlubbers. Of course, there is that bay view. . . .

“In the summertime, everything is open and you get such a nice breeze through here,” said Sandy Taylor, who lives with her husband Michael and two young children on a 37-foot trawler, the Free Byrd, in Sunset Aquatic Marina in Seal Beach. “My husband’s lived down here for 11 years, and I’ve been here for five. Once we started dating, I started coming down here. I was from the Valley, and when I saw this I said, ‘God, this is heaven down here.’ We’ve never thought about moving anywhere else.”

From the point of view of the house, condo or apartment dweller, the Free Byrd is a nook. But the Taylors have managed to turn it into a comfortable and highly functional home for themselves and their son Chad, 3, and Sadie, 1 1/2. The children and their toys--all secured in nets hanging from the bulkhead--occupy the smaller forward cabin, where there is also a head equipped with a flexible shower hose. Sandy and Michael live in the larger after cabin, which opens onto the stern and also has an adjoining head.

The living room, family room, dining room, kitchen and wheelhouse--the designation changes, essentially, on whim--are amidships.

Every item has its place. There is an almost total absence of clutter. The atmosphere is not sterile but shipshape, and somehow manages to look homey. Still, Sandy conceded, most landlubbers would be horrified to learn what sacrifices must be made to make it all work.

“If they came from a house to a boat, they wouldn’t know what to do with all their stuff, because you don’t save anything on a boat,” she said. “Things you’re not going to use, you don’t bring home. Everything that’s here, we use.”

Also, she said, you don’t store things on a boat. You don’t pile them or stack them, either. You secure them.

“If it looks like it’s going to move when you’re out on the water, then it’s going to move,” she said. “So you really don’t want it hanging around. When you pick up and untie your lines, you don’t want to be putting away all this stuff.”

The items that are not bolted down or secured in cabinets are placed on bits of rubber matting called “non-skid.” There are very few glass items, the coffee mugs are of the wide-bottomed no-spill variety, and there are two lines strung across the main hatch to keep even the baby secure (Sandy calls them “baby strings”).

“We’ve been in rough water,” Sandy said, “and nothing moves. Not even the TV.”

The appliances on board are similar to items you might find in any home on land, with one exception: they are almost invariably smaller. Television, microwave oven, stove, refrigerator, table, sinks--all are scaled down. This obviates subtle changes in two common tasks:

Cooking: Sandy said she can cook anything in her on-board kitchen that can be cooked on land--in fact, she said, she has cooked large Thanksgiving dinners--but it must be done in stages because of the limited counter space. “The only thing about cooking here is that you can’t make one big mess at one time,” she said. “You have to make a little bit of mess and then clean up that mess and make another mess and then clean that up, kind of like one course at a time.”

Using the bathroom (actually, the head): Both heads on the Free Byrd are quite confined, so much so that the entire head doubles as a shower. The water simply runs off the bulkheads and flows away through the deck boards.

Fresh water, as well as electricity, comes from hook-ups on the dock, but the Taylors can switch over to on-board water when they shower, since the pump aboard supplies more pressure than the dockside conduit. The toilet must be flushed in a series of steps and the waste collects in an on-board holding tank, which is pumped out periodically at dockside stations.

The boat may be relatively small but, Sandy said, maintenance is almost constant. It must be hauled out of the water every two years and the bottom scraped, and the woodwork must be constantly watched for signs of weather damage and wear. It is a bit like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: the job never ends.

One happy trade-off, however, is the cost of living.

Most Orange County live-aboards tie their boats up in slips that are rented to them, and the rental fee is determined by the size of the boat.

At Sunset Aquatic Marina, for instance, where 10% of the boats are home to live-aboards, the regular slip rate ranges from $8.44 per foot per month to $9.73 per foot. Live-aboards are charged an extra $2.92 per foot per month above the regular slip rate. A $4.20-per-month “dock box” fee pays for fresh water and electrical connections from the dock and if an extra locker on shore is required, it costs $12 per month.

The average rental fee for a 35-foot boat, with utilities, at the Sunset Aquatic Marina would be about $450 per month.

Shower and laundry facilities are provided on shore above the dock area.

In Newport Harbor, where there are about 50 live-aboards, much the same scheme applies. However, live-aboards may tie up at a slip in a privately owned marina or obtain a permit from the city to tie up at an offshore mooring.

There are few live-aboards who tie up to moorings, said Wes Armand, the Newport Beach harbor inspector, mostly because of the necessity of rowing to and from home and the shore. Also, electricity must be produced by a generator or on-board batteries.

The price is right, though. Armand said the yearly fee for moorings is about $7.

Living at a mooring, said Armand, is “a big decision. Living offshore, you have to have more of a commitment to the lifestyle.”

Even a decision to live on a boat tied up to a relatively accommodating slip in a marina specifically set up for the task can produce a dramatic lifestyle change. Cliff and Darlene Heard, who have lived in Newport Harbor for four years aboard their 43-foot Gulfstar sailboat, the Six-T-Six, previously lived on a Northern California ranch.

“We had a great big house out in the country, in a rural farming community,” Cliff said. “But we like boating and we just decided we’d like to try living on a boat. We just decided we wanted to make a change. Sunshine in January had a lot to do with it.”

The price of change was, for the most part, their furniture.

“We sold everything off,” Cliff said. “We kept a few things, personal items, but we sold the rest to the family. We go to visit our furniture every once in a while.”

He admitted that there can be problems inherent in life aboard, but “you realize that most of the problems you have are of your own creation. We didn’t really have any particular problems adapting. We pretty much have everything here, like a stereo and a microwave. It’s just that everything’s smaller. There’s no giant stereo with giant speakers, and our 25-inch TV is now a 9-inch TV. Everything is scaled down, although we do have a great big double bed.”

Parking, however, “is an absolute disaster, especially on weekends.” The marina parking lot, Cliff said, is constantly full.

Still, there’s always the freedom to cast off and sail away. Or is that what the landlubbers would say?

“A lot of people think it’s great, but a lot of people think it’s crazy to live on a boat,” Cliff said. “They probably think you go sailing every weekend and you’re out in the sunshine and come and go as you please and you’re on a permanent vacation, but it’s not really that way. We don’t get to go out very often. The curse of the working class, I guess.”

Bill Johnson and his wife Loraine stay tied to the dock most of the time too. They have lived for the last 16 years aboard their 40-foot Chris Craft, the Sam Cat II, in Dana Point Harbor.

“We took it out a lot at the beginning,” he said, “but now we take it out very seldom. It’s not like having a boat and coming down from the house on the weekend to take it out. If you live on board, you have all these things you have to take down when you want to go out, and after a while you find you’ve been everywhere you want to go. It becomes another home, really.”

The Johnsons used to live in a home in Newport Beach, so long ago, apparently, that Bill claims not to remember why they decided to move aboard.

“We’ve had a number of boats over the years, and since our kids all grew up, we decided to try it. Some people adapt to it easily, but not all. We got along very well. As far as disadvantages go, hers would be the lack of storage space and closet space and mine would be not having a workshop for my hobbies. I miss that.”

Bill said he and Loraine sometimes consider moving back ashore. And, according to Armand, more live-aboards are beginning to do just that, particularly in Newport Harbor.

Some of the private marinas are beginning to discourage live-aboards, Armand said, and the attrition rate among live-aboards “is really pretty high, especially if it’s a couple. Every one of us thinks it would be nice to do for a while, kind of a romantic notion, but many people find out it’s an entirely different thing than they expected.”

For the Taylors, however, there is only one change in the wind: they want to get a bigger boat. The children, who have never known a home ashore, are growing and will need the extra room. Meanwhile, the family continues to set sail in their home about once a month, and enjoy the view.

“At Christmastime, it’s really nice,” Sandy said, “because the Christmas boat parade comes right by here and we have a front row seat. Really, this is it. When it’s summertime and I go inland, I think, ‘Why would anyone ever want to leave here?’ ”