We have moved around a lot in the fairly short time that we have been sailing. Our current and previous slip (in Tacoma) were 36 feet, prices include tax, electricity, and things like fees for having and reading the electric meter.
- We are currently moored at Port of Kingston, NW of Seattle - 36 foot slip, ~$390/mo, will be ~$410 next year. Depending on the size of your boat, there is a multi-year long wait list for permanent moorage.
- When we were in Tacoma at Foss Harbor Marina we paid $401 in 2017 up to $430 in May of this year.
- I don’t have info on our payments to Olympia Yacht Club, but we think it was in the $300s per month. That included a monthly billing of their annual dues, which you could reduce by volunteering to help maintain the facilities or run the club. We always tried to volunteer just enough to get the maximum possible discount.
We checked in to joining the Tacoma Yacht Club, but their total charges were almost identical to FHM, and once you factored in the obligatory club fees and extras (keeping the restaurant in business) may have cost more... we could walk from our condo to FHM, so that was a no-brainer.
OYC had the reputation of having the cheapest moorage rates in Olympia, which was true. The down side was that it was an extra 10 minutes or so to and from your slip to Budd Inlet, when compared to the large municipal marina. Another marina in Olympia might have been marginally cheaper, and even closer to “sailing”, but we were afraid of falling through the holes in the decks of the shabby docks.
When we were relocating to Kingston, nearly all of the marinas that we contacted had a long wait list. One private marina did not, but said that was unusual, and we would have needed to take the slip that they had available almost immediately or risk finding ourselves on their wait list.
One thing that we had heard a long time ago, was that in this area even though there is a cap on the proportion of slips available that can be rented to live aboards, moorage prices are still rising rapidly because it is much less expensive to rent a boat in any marina than to rent or purchase a home of any kind nearby.