I messed some things up when I was expalining how much we are getting paid. Charter companies have 2 separate job designations when it comes to this. They have "Cleaners" (those who clean the inside of the boat) and "washers" (those who wash the outside of the boat. When you charter a Bavaria 46 with us, you have to pay 355€ for the final cleaning and bed linen replacement. What I recieve as a washer is 22 € per boat. It takes me 3 hours to make a boat all sparkly and shiny from the outside. The inside cleaner of that same boat earns 42 euros per boat. So that is 66 euros per boat and a total of 6 hours of labour when you put the washer and the cleaner together. Now factor in income taxes and materials, you get yourself quite an expensive experience all together. Bed linen, chemicals, sponges, brushes, towels, polishing cloths... the most expensive part is water. A sailboat uses more water to get washed outside that it does during the charter trip itself. It uses up somewhere between 2 to 3 tons of water to make a boat shine. The first thing I was told when I started working last year was to never save on water. I was told to dump out as much of it as necessary to get them to shine. This is clean drinkable fresh water, among the best quality ones in Europe. Generally the procedure is to first rinse the boat thuroughly with water to get all the salt off, then we make a mixture of "charlie" (detergent brand) and water in a bucket to get most of the stains off. Then we use a hardcore detergent, called "arf" to get all the hardcore stains off. Then comes the final water rinse. Then we clean the windows, sprayhood and all the aluminum parts (bimini tubes, guardrail stantions, steering wheel spokes...) Then we remove all the water from the large bow lockers, make sure the seals around the bow and stern lockers are shining and ofc. we make sure the cockpit lockers are not filled with water and we clean the insides of those as well. We fill the water tanks as well and coil all the sailing ropes. We even coil the stern lines in the "dutch coil". On the topic of reducing the number of boats, Croatia in 2021 had 4500 redistered charter boats. Considering there has been a lot of new builds in the last 3 years my estimate is that number is now somewhere in the range of 4800 to 5000 boats. Reducing the number of boats doesn't really benefit anyone financially. It wouldn't effect you Nick beacause of the specific nature of your business, but it would most certainly have a very negative effect on the charter companies, and that would very quickly have a very negative effect on the boat owners as well. And that would very quickly have it's own domino effect on the customers. There is a specific ratio of supply and demand that allows for maximum profit, and currently the demand is bigger than the supply. People tend to spit on charter boat owners for being greedy, and nobody actually understands how narrow the profit margins of this industry are. About 2 years ago information was passed to me from somebody who was in this industry since the war, that croatia (in early 2022) would have to get 800 more boats to fully satisfy the demand. If we reduce the supply, the prices of all services will skyrocket. That is not really a problem for romebody who can cough up 380 k€ for a Hanse 460, but an "average joe" like me would get forced out of it.
So many good points made in this! Absolutely loved the rant and the passion you showed! The fact that these things drive you up the wall like this, is a testament to the quality of your work and why 45D is the best out there! Quality doesn't happen by accident and that's why it doesn't come cheap, either!
At first I was like what the heck is "chicken time"? ... Then I got it :) I guess I am so used to the American accents on social media. Anyways thank you for all the educational content you put up!
