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          Your Boat as a Bug Out Vehicle and Destination

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For families who are medium income or wealthy, one idea is to use your house boat or cabin cruiser as a bug out vehicle in the warmer months.  The bug out destination would be a empty cove on a river,  lake or coast line a few mile away from your launching spot.  If your house boat is more than an hour drive or you will be towing your boat to the water you will have extra problems to deal with. 

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This option helps the family work through there fear of what other people are going to do the first and second year of becoming a prepper.

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The first year of prepping could amusingly be called by the third and forth year preppers as the zombie stage where you believe that everybody in the county is going to have mindless energy to walk for miles and miles without food or water to your house and kill you because zombies know where all the preppers live. 

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Zombies in prepping is a metaphor for your fear of what every body inside and outside your neighborhood is going to do. The first year you can not imagine that they are not going to have any gasoline, food or water to come to your house in waves of desperate hungry people / zombies.

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Bugging out on the boat should only be attempted by spouses who know everything about the boat, were raised on boats, do not have young children and can both operate and repair the boat if other spouse is injured. 

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Everything on the boat has to be in great shape repaired or replaced and have spare parts available on board.  Install and test your TV, satellite radio and Internet deices on the boat.  These devices will keep you updated on the burying of bodies, the establishment of a FEMA camps and the relief agencies bringing in supplies and services to your area. 

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Research information and practice becoming your own meteorologist.  There will be no weather channel.  Pick a flat cove where you can tie up with several ropes and be able to abandon the boat if a violent storm damages the boat. 

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As you work the four stages of prepper denial and start working on your sheltering in place plan. Lay on the table establishing a compound at your house or trading with other compounds.  In your house install a 12 volt battery lighting system and run a line from your battery bank inverter to your wood stove and furnace. In the middle of January shut off your electric power and water service to practice using your generator, water and food stores for a week.  This practice run will show you what problems need to be addressed in the house and on the boat.

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Purchase a small used pontoon boat to pull behind your boat to hold your extra water, gasoline and other supplies.  If some ask why do you have two boats the same size.  You can tell them some of you friends want to swim and fish and others want to go the marina for dinner.  This extra boat can also be motored out to fish or be use as a life boat if the main boat sinks or capsizes 

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Your self defense, first aid and cooking arrangements will use the same material, training and supplies as you would at the compound or on the boat.

 

Other boaters will also try this. 

 

On your pontoon storage barge you can have pasta, sugar and flower which weighs less than can goods to trade with other bug out boaters. 

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If someone does get hurt then you can motor back to the dock where you left your car and put the battery back in that you took with you.

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River boats are going to have the trouble with the current pulling them south and the locks will not be operational.  Boats operating off the coast will need a water maker machine.  River and lake boats will have to have a water filter system for fresh water to drink.