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Post by Deleted on Jan 16, 2016 1:26:48 GMT
I believe this boils down to two basic situations:
1) The seastead does not own or have a satisfactory landing contract with a on-shore spot of land, where vehicles (seasteader-owned) may be parked indefinately or summoned (taxi).
2) There is an established marina where a seastead has a rented slip, parking area, mail/packages can be picked up, delivered, and held, and where there's possibly a small store.
I think the situation #1 demands a "zero presence" style. This would mean a roll-on/roll-off (aka ro-ro) barge, carrying a land vehicle and possibly a baby trailer. This could be used at state parks, most marinas that allow simple ramp use for $5 or so, or even unimproved beaches. The vehicles carried may be regular lightweight subcompact cars or pickup trucks, or trikes or regular motorcycles, or the suped up golf carts becoming increasingly popular in retirement communities. Ideally, one (or more) peoples would head to town in the land vehicle, and one (or more) would remain on the barge to park it away from traffic and then do marine activities or connect to a local wifi for internet activities (possibly also beaming to/from the seastead at this time).
Situation #2 is so far beyond me for financial reasons at this time, i can only speculate. But i imagine any seasteader can boat to their slip, park, get into the land vehicle, and go do things.
There's several differences between #1 and #2 which must be considered.
One is the cost of keeping the land rented with an agreeable contract, and possibly needing to enforce the contract. Marinas i have researched, which have slip or vehicle parking for rent in the $100's per month range, refuse to accept any responcibility for what happens to your property. Anything you leave there after paying to leave it, may be stolen or damaged an hour later. You may be away from your property for weeks, giving ample opportunity for it to disappear.
With a rental agreement, you are pretty much locked into that location. If you boat to another marina, you aren't going anywhere on land without a rental land vehicle. If you go somewhere else alone, you will be paying transient slip rental, even if you are there only 5 daylight hours.
If you are not using your ro-ro barge, you are likely subject to the marina's approval of what you carry to your boat. By using a ro-ro, you drive into the marina and onto your barge without stopping or discussing what's inside your car or under your appropriately covered trailer (you might have 200 gallons of cheap no-name gasoline instead of the $4 stuff that marina sells).
One down side to not renting a slip full time and having mail and package delivery, is you must set up those functions elsewhere. There are such businesses, in average towns everywhere. I hear that some in coastal towns might even announce deliveries to you on marine vhf radio. Some advertise they will open, scan, and email paperwork to you.
The other trade off of a rented slip and regular boat (and land vehicle parking), vs a large barge carrying a land vehicle, is up-front cost of the barge. But over a fairly short time, rental of land space which you actually rarely use, will be greater than your ro-ro barge cost. And the barge can be used anywhere, and possibly for other purposes.
Your ro-ro can carry 24ft steel or basalt building materials, as well as many bags of concrete and a few goats. Or a 16ft trailer with 6 tons of free leaves for the floating garden. Or a huge coil of plastic pipe. Or a large generator for that floating music shindig you're hosting. These are things the average boat cannot carry.
I am seeing the reliance on the marina as a pricey crutch, it's like buying electricity and drinking water, when you can provide those things for yourself. It depends on your situation, in many ways. I provide my own drinking water, i will on the seastead too. I have provided my own electricity for years at a time, i will on the seastead too. I know how, and have actually built boats and floaties, i can build a barge. The things you can do, vs the time it takes to do those things, also becomes an issue.
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Post by gordien on Jan 23, 2016 16:17:50 GMT
I woke up thinking about storing a vehicle on the supply barge and started to wonder about corrosion and rusting. I wouldn't want to store a vehicle in a parking lot.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 23, 2016 20:47:42 GMT
I woke up thinking about storing a vehicle on the supply barge and started to wonder about corrosion and rusting. Corrosion will be part of life on a seastead. It will happen to anything that air can get to: your garden, your door hinges, your electrical and electronics. There's various steps you can take, of course. The ultimate brute force protection would be to park the land vehicle in a small thin-skinned garage, which would be probably the smallest enclosed space on the entire gulf/seastead, if you think about it from a bird's eye view. Or a room of your work space. Or part of the supports for your living space. I have considered that with a small barn for the trike, the trailer can easily fit in that attic, or turned up on it's side against a wall, using a winch, with the push of a button. Ventilate the space slightly from your living space to lower the humidity, hose it down with the desalinated water after trips, as needed.
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Post by jeff on Jan 24, 2016 0:49:06 GMT
Reducing metal (especially bare metal) to a minimum will also help. Might consider some of the fiberglass composite vehicles, then ensure that all metal is properly treated.
It might be possible, since the small-garage was mentioned, to rinse, air-dry, and enclose the vehicle, while including a container of rechargeable dessicant, like the gel beads included in most packaging, these days. A readily available, larger-scale version is used to supply water to plants, and even cut flowers. Remove the excess moisture, to prevent unnecessary corrosion...
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Post by Deleted on Jan 30, 2016 3:24:54 GMT
Keeping the vehicles as cheap as possible would help in a way: they'd be less costly to replace.
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Post by johngalt on May 11, 2016 3:20:43 GMT
Also hydrophobic coatings will help.
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Post by jeff on Dec 23, 2016 16:42:01 GMT
One big problem is exposure to crude oil will cause it to be removed, due to the solvents in the crude oil. The Gulf of Mexico has permanent seeps, so exposure to crude oil is a given. Spills make the problem even more of an issue.
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Post by thebastidge on Dec 30, 2016 17:38:48 GMT
-One is the cost of keeping the land rented with an agreeable contract, and possibly needing to enforce the contract.
The cost at recreational public marinas runs pretty small compared to the cost of renting a home, less than the cost of a normal car payment. The contracts are pretty simple, and rarely is there conflict of any real dramatic kind needing 'enforcement'.
-Marinas i have researched, which have slip or vehicle parking for rent in the $100's per month range, refuse to accept any responsibility for what happens to your property.
Similar to any other rental agreement. I've never had a landlord accept responsibility for my household furnishings, my auto, or anything on the property that isn't integral to the property. Even storage rentals won't typically insure your goods stored there as part of the rental agreement. You can get extra insurance for fire, theft, water damage etc. but it costs. On the other hand, theft in a marina is remarkably low. It does happen, and it can be catastrophic, but there are SOOOOOO many unsecured, moderate to high dollar value items accessible in the average marina, it's unbelievable there isn't more theft. And even more low dollar items that add up pretty quickly. On the other hand, most marinas have at least some restrictions on access, and theft is pretty noticeable and somewhat traceable. More so all the time with cameras, access card logs, etc.
Long term vehicle parking is pretty similar everywhere, but many secure options exist- LOTS of cities have it for people who rarely drive, airports, marinas, keeping a vehilce in a locked lot works fine most of the time. There's no guarantees in life and things cost money. TANSTAAFL.
-Anything you leave there after paying to leave it, may be stolen or damaged an hour later. You may be away from your property for weeks, giving ample opportunity for it to disappear.
This is the case with people who live on land too. Many people visit their boat a few times a year- VERY few visit it daily. We don't even lock our cabin, because we have service people visit when we're not there. It's a very different environment.
-With a rental agreement, you are pretty much locked into that location. If you boat to another marina, you aren't going anywhere on land without a rental land vehicle.
True, for the first part. On the second, perhaps: unless you carry your vehicle with you, or the things you need are local to the marina. Electric bikes, bicycles, etc are pretty compact and light. Many of the new electric bikes have 20-40 miles round trip capacity on a charge, even without peddling. If you're crossing national boundaries, you also have issues of import, registration, and licensing of vehicles and drivers.
-If you go somewhere else alone, you will be paying transient slip rental, even if you are there only 5 daylight hours.
Depends on whether you have a reciprocity agreement between the marinas/clubs. We get reciprocal docking privileges at a couple marinas, and discounts at others. Most public docks are super cheap if you tie up in the public spaces without services (electric/water hookup)
-If you are not using your ro-ro barge, you are likely subject to the marina's approval of what you carry to your boat. By using a ro-ro, you drive into the marina and onto your barge without stopping or discussing what's inside your car or under your appropriately covered trailer (you might have 200 gallons of cheap no-name gasoline instead of the $4 stuff that marina sells).
There are some incorrect assumptions here that will trip you up. First- you're not going to get a car on/off a public recreational marina dock. It's going to have to be a commercial dock. There simply isn't any way to drive onto the average dock, and onto a boat from there. It's not designed for it. Just getting a dual sport motorcycle onto and off of a boat would be tough, without a crane on your boat and some kind of davits to stow it. That's if they would let you take the thing onto their docks in the first place (crowded, not enough flotation capacity, liability, driver training/certification for docks and confined spaces, clean marina rules etc.) If you can't pick it up and step over the gap with it, it's not likely to happen. Second, the marina literally could not care less what you're putting on your boat. They don't want to be involved as a transshipping location for drugs or human trafficking of course, because it would bring scrutiny from the cops and get them shut down if they're negligently complicit in such things. But they really don't care where you get your gas or your potatoes. Many recreational marinas have rules that prohibit you from fueling from cans at the slip. This is due to spillage from careless, poorly educated and untrained recreational boaters, not to profit motive in selling you the gas. Their liability to losing their permits is FAR more important to them than making a few bucks on gas. Major fueling operations for larger vessels have extra safety and environmental precautions involved.
Bottom line, the kind of operations you're talking about will involve daily fees or lease on commercial docks, and will be limited to marinas with the appropriate facilities.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 30, 2016 18:40:03 GMT
There are some incorrect assumptions here that will trip you up. First- you're not going to get a car on/off a public recreational marina dock. It's going to have to be a commercial dock. Why can't you use the roro at any boat ramp? Many recreational marinas have rules that prohibit you from fueling from cans at the slip. I am not too far off my assumptions here, because 300 gallons of fuel will weigh twice what i am going to carry on the baby trailer behind any car (or trike), or thrice what i would be comfortable carrying. So i'd go get 100 gallons, drive back and offload into the roro tanks, and then to land again, repeat till the boat tanks are full. If i can assume i drive on-off the roro at the boat launch ramp, then the marina won't know i am transfering fuel. Naturally, this operation would mean reversing the roro to get off it, unless i can back the trailer off the boat and up the ramp, or turn it around on the boat, or etc. Situations, locations, and needs may vary each time, batteries not included.
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Post by thebastidge on Dec 30, 2016 19:07:16 GMT
I could see doing that, but a boat launch and a marina are not the same thing.
Where I live, we have public boat launches at state and city owned properties. They generally have zero services. Access to the ramp is limited to loading and unloading vessels onto trailers and boarding. Parking is daily use, generally not allowed overnight, has a daily fee, is not secured and in fact, this is where the majority of casual theft and vandalism occurs. They may be relatively remote from shopping, hospitals, living accommodations and any other services. Typically they are convenient for recreational fishing and boating and nothing else.
We have marinas at city and privately owned properties. They have services (fuel, pump out, mechanical, electricity, water), but more often than not, do not have boat ramps for launching from a trailer. They may or may not have lifts. short and long term moorage is available, dedicated and/or secured parking is available. Access is controlled to greater or lesser extent.
Then we have commercial docks, which can accommodate vessels with significant draft, have materials handling equipment, and services available, including docks accessible by vehicle (cargo or private).
Your Ro-Ro may draft too much for most public boat launches. Or it could be too wide abeam. Or it may work perfectly fine but just leave you far from what you need.
I should have added in my post above- we only pay significant transient fees at marinas where we overnight with electric hookup. For example, we can tie up in just about any club marina as a guest for part of the day without paying a fee as long as we're not tying up in someone else's slip. Tying up along the outside breakwater dock doesn't cost anything. Overnighting can cost anywhere from $30 (the special price we got a few days ago for being part of the Christmas Ship parade) to over $100/night during Blues Fest, both prices at the Willamette River Place waterfront. The City of Portland isn't even collecting daily use fees for the public finger these days at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. They haven't had envelopes in the payment box for at least 3 years and haven't enforced payment in that time.
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Post by thebastidge on Dec 30, 2016 19:19:41 GMT
So i'd go get 100 gallons, drive back and offload into the roro tanks, and then to land again, repeat till the boat tanks are full. If i can assume i drive on-off the roro at the boat launch ramp, then the marina won't know i am transfering fuel. Naturally, this operation would mean reversing the roro to get off it, unless i can back the trailer off the boat and up the ramp, or turn it around on the boat, or etc. Situations, locations, and needs may vary each time, batteries not included. Typically, it would make more sense to back down onto the RoRo than to try to do it any other way. Making a RoRo that has the ability to off-load from either end is dramatically more complicated and inefficient space-wise. But the only way that makes sense to transfer large amounts of fuel on a regular basis is with equipment designed to do large fuel transfers. Anything else is not safe nor environmentally sound. That's why there's facilities at marinas to fuel boats. Gas cans are not the way to go. Personally, I have a 35 gallon gasoline caddy, ( something like this) which is a rectangular poly tank with largish wheels, a gas pump style hose & nozzle, and a hand crank. When full, I can lift it down from my truck bed by myself, but I am a very big guy and I would not want to have to lift it into the truck full. I got it from Craig's list for a couple hundred bucks with an extra rotary hand pump because the original was frozen up. The gas caddy retails for about $400-500, and the extra pump around $100. I took the original pump apart and cleaned it up- voila, two working pumps. This solution is also acceptable to most marinas because it's not standing over a gap between dock and vessel pouring from a can with a bitch of a nozzle/cut-off mechanism. It does benefit from two-person operation, one to hold the nozzle in the deck fill and one to operate the crank, but there are gasoline-safe electric fuel pumps available that could make it a one-person operation.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 30, 2016 19:37:04 GMT
I have a 6x2x2 steel tank, but was going to used a 4x6x1 baffled steel tank with a gravity fed large bore outlet, operated by removing the plug, attaching to the boat tank, opening valve. Gravity drain would be assisted by pulling the tilt pin on the trailer. That's why there's facilities at marinas to fuel boats. Assuming i am at such a location. I found a number of places along the coast that are public ramps, or small marinas with ramps, or fishing piers with ramps, with no fuel. But several are under a mile to grocery stores and gas stations. It's not optimal to be paying road tax on fuel for a boat, but sometimes the places catering to boats (whatever you want to call them) charge over a dollar more per gallon for fuel.
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Post by thebastidge on Dec 30, 2016 19:38:15 GMT
We're working on a deal to buy a bigger boat right now. We've put an offer on a 35ft Carver 350 Mariner (36'9" LOA). It drafts 3'. I used my F250 to splash our 27 LOA Bayliner (6800 lbs dry) and it was a significant operation. Our new boat (if we work out the deal) will weigh almost 19,000 lbs dry, with a 12' beam requiring special overland towing permit, chase and lead car, and limited hours of transport.So I've been doing research on shipping options, and determined we have lifts in our area for private repair yards and private marinas to lift boats to 70' and 70 tons.
These larger boats at the upper end of that lift capacity could never use a public boat ramp even if they could be towed overland, because the boat ramps are designed for <30'LOA and <9'beam towable vessels to be backed into the water on a trailer behind a pickup truck. The ramps themselves are often abrupt in drop-off at the end, and it's very difficult to tell how much water you have beneath you and how much more ramp there is before that drop-off until you put your trailer in the water and find it the hard way. I don't think we could use a boat ramp with the new boat- for one thing it'll be delivered by a semi truck with a low-boy trailer, which won't work on the boat ramp, but even then, 3 feet of draft might not get us close enough in without grounding. A Ro-Ro might not get close enough to the average boat ramp's dry pavement to use a bridging ramp without significant engineering of said ramp for supporting a vehicle over long expanse.
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Post by thebastidge on Dec 30, 2016 19:44:40 GMT
I have a 6x2x2 tank, but was going to used a 4x6x1 baffled tank with a gravity fed large bore outlet, operated by removing the plug, attaching to the boat tank, opening valve. Gravity drain would be assisted by pulling the tilt pin on the trailer. Make sure your drain valve is accessible in emergencies. It would be a catastrophe if you needed to cease fueling operations in the middle and were unable to do so. You MUST have a means of cutting off fuel flow. This is very basic. A positive connection between the transfer tank and the fuel tank if you're going to do drastic, gross movements like letting a trailer tilt with the gas flowing. I would HIGHLY recommend you have a better solution than gravity feed alone. You need a transfer pump of some kind. Also be aware that water is heavier than gas, so gravity fed means that any water that gets into your portable tank will end up in your vessel's tank.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 30, 2016 19:52:19 GMT
The ramp i used at the local lake has a 2ft drop at the end, and one corner broken off. I had no problem launching or recovering a 16ft x 12ft pontoon boat (i built the boat and the trailer).
I don't expect the weight or draft to be an issue. I do expect the angle of the concrete boat ramp to the roro's ramp to be an occasional problem, as well as the angle of roro's deck to the roro's ramp. Not everything can be perfect at all times.
I get the feeling you are saying i should forget about using any transport except a motorcycle, and load it only at commercial docks. I am unwilling to be at the mercy of a single operator of a busy commercial site, possibly surrounded by idle private or public ramps. I am also unwilling to be in a situation where i cannot go get a month's supply of groceries or fuel.
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