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Hi Teresa, I hope you are well. It sounds as if you are enjoying life onboard!

Spagna (Lou and Deb) did a trip to the Bahama's this past winter, and did a great trip report on costs and such. Send them a friend request if you haven't already, I'm sure they will be more than happy to help you get your budget worked out.

If you find yourself on either cost of Florida please send us a message so we can try to get together and meet you in person.

Stay safe, Stan.

Sorry to take so long but been busy playing farmer all summer including erecting 2,000 ft if stock fence and planting and harvesting a 1 acre garden and vinyard. Following is a copy of my post from March of this year.  email is debandlou@verizon.net if you have any questions.

Having been home from our trip to the Bahamas for a week now we have had time to total up our expenses.  We have come up with some stats on what it cost and what we consumed.  We know some of you are planning a similar cruise soon so we broke this out first and are passing it along now.  For those of you who are cruisers or are just interested we have a 14 page Word document that is the Ship's Stores inventory which includes the equipment and stores we loaded onto Wu-Hsin (all 3600 lbs that put her 6 inches lower in the water) including quantities loaded and quantities actually used.  If you want the document just reply to this email and ask for the Ship's Stores Document and we'll send it only to those who request it.

We planned a 180 day voyage and were actually gone 121 days.
In general we consumed about 2/3 of the stores so we had plenty left if we had stayed longer.

During our 10 weeks in the Bahamas we:
Dined out for either breakfast, lunch or dinner 14 times.
Had drinks or snacks ashore 6 times.
Stayed in marinas 9 nights total. Dockage cost $1.25 per foot most places and up to $1.60 in a couple of others. Two marinas counted our dockage towards food and drink purchases at their facilities so it was like 'room and board' for the cost of the dockage. When not in marinas we anchored only and never took moorings which cost between $10 to $25 per night.
Water cost between $.20 and $.40 per gallon at the marinas.

On the way out and back on the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) we:
Dined out 8 times.
Had drinks or snacks ashore 2 times.
Stayed in marinas 5 nights on the way out and 8 nights on the way back.  The 3  extra nights on the return were because it was so cold we wanted to hook up to AC and run the electric heater we purchased.

The average monthly cost was $1,100.00.  This total includes gasoline purchases and we motorsailed everywhere. This does not include the one time payment of $150.00 for the cruising permit. This also excludes equipment purchases along the way. In addition we spent about $500.00 in provisioning before setting off. Most of our canned and dehydrated food came from <internet=grocer.com> .  Anyone looking for backup storable food should check out this site. High quality at reasonable prices.
All of this was within our estimated budget for the trip. It is also slightly less than our monthly budget for similar costs if we had stayed in Cullowhee.  We count marina stays as part of the 'entertainment' line in the budget.
We were able to use a Visa card for all transactions except at one restaurant and 2 small grocery stores in the Bahamas.

We hope you find this information helpful or at least interesting depending on your situation.

Deb and Lou
Bella Pertosa, Cullowhee, NC  USA

Lou