Boat People, American-Style

Live-aboards, hide-aboards and work-aboards

"If I wanted structure," argues Travis McGee, "I'd live in a house with a Florida room, have 2.7 kids, a dog, a cat, a smiling wife, two cars, a viable retirement and profit-sharing plan, a seven handicap and shortness of breath." McGee, of course, is the swashbuckling hero of 18 John D. MacDonald mystery novels who lives on a houseboat, The Busted Flush, that he won in a poker game. His aversion to structured, land-based predictability is shared by an ever growing number of Americans who live year-round on their boats.

From ocean to ocean and at countless riversides and lakefronts in between, the sizes, shapes, designs and origins of live-aboard boats could fill pages in Lloyd's Register of Ships. They range from Chinese junks to sleek power cruisers, from 30-ft. sailboats to converted trawlers. At Waldo Point, just north of San Francisco, Sandy White, 32, a businesswoman, lives aboard a 41-year-old, 62-ft. former naval ferry that she bought for $4,500 in 1972 and has since spent some $50,000 to refurbish; it boasts a living room big enough for a central stove, bookshelves and a piano. At Seattle's Shilshole Bay Marina, John Polikowsky, 55, an art teacher, has spent six years building his 44-ft. live-aboard sloop, Panope. "This," he says, "is a good combination of having my cake and living in it."

Though it is not suited for offshore cruising, a houseboat built to be just that generally offers more living space for less money than any other craft. (Houseboat sales came to $17.5 million in 1978, an increase of nearly 23% over the year before.) A modest 38-ft. houseboat with sleeping space for six may be bought new for $38,000. Major costs thereafter will be about $1,200 a year for insurance and perhaps $2,700 for marina rental. In northern climes, electricity and heating fuel may add another $1,000 a year. Many marinas provide shower rooms, laundry facilities, security, and free parking. Says Jim Cole, head of special services at bustling Marina del Rey in Southern California, where the owner of a 30-ft. boat pays only about $100 a month: "You couldn't rent a flophouse for that kind of money."

A major discouragement for would-be water rats is the parlous shortage of dock space. There's a three-to four-year waiting list at Miami's city-maintained Dinner Key Marina. Southern California's spectacularly beautiful Long Beach Marina has been booked solidly since the day it opened in 1956. Many private marina owners will not accept live-aboards because of their demands on dockside services. As a result of berth control, there is a whole subsubculture of hide-aboards, who tie up what looks like a weekend cruiser and then surreptitiously move in, lock, schlock and beer barrel.

Some successful boat people are also work-aboards. New Yorker Harvey Abramson, 48, a bright-eyed, bearded designer of medical equipment, maintains an office in midtown Manhattan that he has not visited for a year; he does all his work in the fo'c'sle of his 43-ft. cabin cruiser, which is berthed in a boat basin on the Hudson River at Manhattan's 79th Street. He keeps in touch with secretary and clients by onboard phone. Says he: "My therapy is tinkering. On a boat there's always something to do." There's also always something to do for his son Ari, 13. Says Abramson: "Living here for kids is a real learning experience. They have to learn how to take care of motors, put gas in the engine, disconnect the phone, handle the lines, and a lot more."

Some boat kids can swim before they can walk. Dorothea Johnston's ketch-reared kids have left Long Beach Marina, their home port, but Son Monte, 25, is an aspiring officer in the Merchant Marine, while Daughter Thea, 26, became Southern California's first woman deckhand on a commercial fishing boat. (She is studying for her captain's license.)

Adults and offspring learn to respect and cherish their neighbors, who may live only four feet away. In emergencies--a ruptured water line, a balky motor, a hidden leak, suspicious intruders--boat owners of necessity lean on one another. There are no class distinctions or keeping-up-with-yawl in a marina. Says Manhattan-based Les Torgensen, 45, a writer and boat dealer who ran away to sea when he was 15: "The beauty of boat dwelling here is that we've got small-town living in the heart of a big city."

Marina mariners wax lyrical over the psychological and physical rewards of being their own skippers. Mrs. Johnston, 48, has lived for more than twelve years on her wooden 55-ft. sailboat, Silhouette. "I love the water," she says. "I love to get up in the morning and see the seagulls. It's a lovely sensation being rocked to sleep. It's like a continuous camping-out trip."

Still, life aboard your own boat is not quite like first class on the QE2.

Storage space is almost as tight as on a spaceship, and living quarters are as cramped as they were for Captain Bligh's midshipmen. Says a California boatwife: "When you cook corned beef and cabbage, everything you wear next day smells like corned beef and cabbage." Miamian Tom Dixon, 35, who inhabits a relatively spacious 45-ft. catamaran houseboat he designed and built, notes that his 360-sq.-ft. living area is the equivalent of a one-car garage. Even at a dock, high winds and storms can make a boat dweller feel as if he were inside a Cuisinart.

Clothing gathers mildew. Water seeps through the seams, while drinking water is usually in short supply. In some areas, winter is a constant war against cold weather. Live-aboards cannot take for granted such mundane matters as toilets and garbage disposal, laundry, showering, washing, utility and telephone connections. Says New Yorker Susan Elliott, 33, who runs a happy ship with Daughter Tania, 11: "It makes living on a New Hampshire farm seem easy." (She tried that too.) A less tangible disadvantage is that boat people lose their old landlubber friends. Also, banks and stores sometimes look on a local Sinbad as a dubious credit risk. After all, he/she may cast off for Samoa or Sardinia on the whim of a wind.

In fact, most live-aboards are solid middle class, with a high proportion of divorced people (hence the number of boats with names like Second Life and New Beginning). At New York's 79th Street boat basin, skippers of the 80-strong year-round fleet include a drug-company officer, a masseuse, the owner of a thriving fashion firm, an inventor, a rabbi, an actress, a TV producer, advertising and insurance executives, a stock analyst, a nurse and a porno movie queen. Most started off by renting a boat for summer weekends. Then they became addicted, but kept an apartment as an anchor to windward. Then they gave up the pad.

For most live-aboards, the ketch or cruiser is like a mobile home buoyed on the briny. No small part of the allure of boat living is that, theoretically at least, you don't need to dock anywhere except to take on fuel and supplies. Scanning the sunset at the helm of his schooner, Atlantas, in Los Angeles Harbor, Teacher Ron Remsburg muses: "When you look at that compass, you can say to yourself: I can go any direction in the world that I want to go." Or stay at home, listening to the slapping halyards, creaking hull, bird cries and the whisper of the evening tide.

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