A dose of reality for the folks on this thread new to boating and asking about it (I'm not sure how many there are, either Blue Heron).......
So you buy your boat and begin your boating dream. In addition to the wonderful scenery-- unless you boat east of the Mississippi (excluding Maine) or south of the latitude comprising Oregon's southern border where there isn't any
-- and wildlife and beautiful sunsets and lazy days on the moorings, there is also this experience which my wife and I just got to enjoy this past weekend.
It's called "Time To Change Out The Aft Toilet to Holding Tank Plumbing."
It involves figuring out how to cut out and remove twenty feet of old hose and PVC without spilling any of the "contents" onto what you don't want to spill it on. You get to grunt and sweat and curse as you try to remove hose that's glommed onto hose fittings with a death grip like you wouldn't believe. (Helpful Hint-- a heat gun makes this problem go away.)
You get to fish around in the bilge for the tiny screw that you dropped or the screwdriver that rolled away from you and lodged in the most inaccessible spot under the water tanks.
You get to contort yourself into a far, dark corner of the lazarette being careful not to step on or get caught in the steering cables. It involves removing and figuring out where to put a heavy mattress and drawers and bed platform panels.
It involves some amazing smells.
Then you get to snake the old plumbing sections out which virtually guarantees that at least one of the plastic bags you so carefully taped over all the cut ends will snag on a sharp shard of fiberglass or a splinter and dump its contents onto you as well as the boat.
Then you get to clean and disinfect all the parts of the boat you've exposed with bleach and stuff. (Helpful Hint-- marry a person who likes doing this sort of thing so you won't have to.)
You get to fabricate new piping and hose support panels for the improved plumbing configuration you've come up with. This involves buying and shaping the right wood and mixing up CPES to seal it with and then painting and then screwing on the panels which of course mount in the far recesses of the dark, cramped lazarette.
There
is a reward to all this, which is installing the new PVC and hose and having it all come together like you wanted it to. But the reward doesn't come until the end, before which you will have asked yourself several times why the hell the goddamned boat was making you do this in the first place.
Then you get to put back all the crap you had to move to do the project, some of which you've forgotten how you maneuvered out to begin with.
Like the question "how did B-29 pilots take a dump on twelve-hour bombing missions to Japan in WWII?" this is an aspect of boating nobody will ever tell you about in forums when they are bombarding you with advice on what boat to buy for your dream cruise and what route to take and where to stop for lunch.
So I thought I would. (I also know about the B-29 pilots but I won't go into that here.)
Now you can hire this kind of work out if you want to. At yard labor rates that are at or approaching $100 an hour, this 1.5 to 2 day job will set you back about $2,000 when you add in materials, environmental disposal fees, and all the other creative things yards come up with to charge you for these days. Maybe even more depending on the yard.
So while the ratio of maintenance to enjoyment with a boat is not as bad as it is for a helicopter where they say for every hour in the air it has to spend a week in maintenance, or a Jaguar E-Type which has a 1:1 ratio for driving hours vs maintenance hours, a boat is nevertheless an item that is in an "I'm breaking" mode 24/7/365. Which means one way or the other you have to keep fixing it. Or preventing it from breaking even more.
Not trying to discourage you from getting into boating--- we all did it here and most of us feel the upside makes the downside well worth putting up with. But you should get into it realizing full well that it's not all dolphins riding your bow wave and pretty sunsets.