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Yacht Fractions
The aim is to jointly purchase and maintain a cruising yacht and to establish it at a 'home port' somewhere in the warm waters of Southern Europe, either on the Mediterranean, the Aegean, or the southernTurkish coast.
The yacht will be large enough to live aboard for an extended period, with comfortable accommodation for up to six people. It will be as extensively equipped as a typical, small vacation apartment with similar facilities for entertaining, sleeping, cooking, or lounging around both inside and on deck.
Partners, with family or friends, will have exclusive entitlement to live aboard and use our yacht for an agreed period of weeks every year, which will be defined relative to size of their financial investiment in the Yacht Fractions Scheme.
Our yacht could be just a delightful holiday home at its marina base in a warm and sunny location. Or partners may want to take a more active sailing role, cruising locally from the yacht's home port to any number of fabulous anchorages nearby.
Sailing, on the Costa Brava, close to Barcelona
Calanque de Port Pin, South of France
During the first year or two of ownership, 'learning the ropes' may be an objective for those with limited experience of yachts and sailing. To meet this ambition, patient and confidence-inspiring tuition is offered from one of the primary partners, who is well-qualified and hugely experienced in teaching novices about sailing, and has extensive yachting expertise gained over many decades of sailing and messing around in boats.
A typical scene as yachts converge on The Needles, IoW, in The Solent's annual Round-the-Island Race.
Shared ownership of a yacht is a popular way to much more cost-effective use of an expensive asset. The Royal Yachting Association, the principal authority in the UK for leisure-boat use and ownership, provides a useful guide for those considering a joint-ownership scheme (available here). Also worth consulting is a feature recently published in the magazine 'Yachting World' on the same topic (here), together with another recent article published by a major yacht broker (here).
So plenty of guidance is available and to consider before committing to our scheme.
Yacht fractions will be a joint-owner, partnership scheme designed for families and friends to jointly own a substantial, live-aboard cruising yacht for vacations, or extended breaks from living and working in the UK.
How the scheme will work
The first task is to find a Suitable Yacht that fits our needs and our budget. Once assessed, surveyed, serviced and equipped, it will be re-located to a 'Home Port' - somewhere warm that we have agreed will serve as a good base for perhaps the first two or three years. From then, it be available for everyone's use.
The calendar year will be divided into two parts: time afloat - the 'sailing year' - and time ashore for winter maintenance. Just like cars and houses, yachts need looking after, and the more regularly this is attended to, the less complex (and expensive!) it is. Typically, this division might be 80% of the year afloat and 20% ashore. The most approrpriate arrangement will be for the partners to discuss and agree upon.
The 'sailing year' is then divided into 'sailing weeks' with the number of weeks a partner is entitled to, determined in direct proportion to the size of their ownership share. The greater the investment share, the more sailing weeks are assigned.
Calendar available here
A popular anchorage in Menorca, Spain - an easily cruisable destination for a yacht based on the Costa Brava
A sensible and workable solution could be that the calendar year is divided into 12 weeks ashore in the winter for maintenance - which experience has shown is reasonable - which leaves 40 weeks afloat for everyone to enjoy their investment.
We then allocate the number of weeks available for each partner (and family or friends) to have exclusive use of the yacht according to the proportion of the yacht they own. For example, a partner who has invested a 25% ownership share of the yacht would be entitled to 10 weeks' exclusive use (being 25% of the 40 'sailing weeks').
Mutual agreement between us at an annual partners' meeting would establish which weeks are allocated to whom, in addition to deciding where the yacht would be based afloat for the coming year, and how winter maintenance could be scheduled. Previous experience of joint ownership of a yacht based in the Mediterranean showed this arrangement to be workable and amicable.
