As a practical matter, has anyone ever found a boat sharing partner online? Even a quick look at the various boating blogs, forums and bulletin boards indicates there are a large number of people actively looking for boating partnerships, but has anyone ever found one through one of these avenues?

I see post after post of people tentatively sticking their toe into the boat sharing water hoping it doesn’t get bitten off by the few but extremely vocal old salts who “tried boat sharing” a decade ago and lost their boat, wife, children and toe nails. “Don’t do it!” they say, “It always ends badly.”

All that is about to change. We are at the precipice of a shift in how the boating industry views boat sharing. Why? Because people are increasingly unwilling to let assets go to waste. Leveraging unused and underused assets has become a reality in the modern age. EBay, Amazon and many other sites allow people to capitalize on items they no longer use instead of throwing them away. A myriad of sites allow people to share their cars, planes, houses, etc. It’s time for the boating industry to get on board.

This is a summary of an article posted on our blog - read the entire article here .

Sharing services are cool. Big fan of car2go. starting my 7th year with Freedom boat club. love those guys. not sure what else there is to say.

Nautical Monkey loves Freedom Boat Club - they offer a great service for their members...However, for individuals who already have a boat – but don’t use it nearly enough or are looking for ways to easily share their boat with a partner Nautical Monkey offers the tools to do that.

In addition, for smaller lake areas not served by a Boat Club – Nautical Monkey is a great way for individuals to connect with boat owners looking to share.

NM is a Great idea!

Well, following that logic, you should share your car Don 🙂

presumably I'd receive some benefit from sharing my car such as getting to use another car (ideally a truck on occasion) or sharing the cost of maintenance and I'd be cool with that. I'm considering getting rid of it completely as I like the models where I have zero direct ownership like car2go and Freedom. zipcar would probably work better if I didn't have any car. I've used B-cycle in San Antonio and Denver and hope the delay for its implementation here ends soon. What other sharing services are there?

For those who have a car but want to share it...a new upstart company called getaround.com is a good option we have used.

I have a few bay area friends that have used getaround.

Read the article on your blog - nice article - I have had a partner on my boat for the past few years (didn't meet him online incidentally) and things are going well. We have actually become quite good friends - go out on the boat together and attend each other's get-togethers. We actually shared the same boat with Sailtime - boat sharing club - and decided to go in together on our own boat when our contracts came up. My partner is a much more avid boater than I am and I have definitely learned a lot from going out with him on the lake. We share costs, labor, etc., and I imagine it would be a completely different (and probably more painful) experience if I was going it alone.

I'm looking forward to the release of the update on your site that you talk about in the article. I've shared a boat off and on for decades. Most of my sharing has been a trade for work/maintenance which works out pretty well for everyone. I get reasonable access to a boat and the owner gets his boat taken care of. It's difficult to find those kind of deal though - even though I know they are out there. Will your new system allow me to list myself as available for this kind of share?

Hi Sammy. The new system is designed to be completely open in terms of what you list and how you list it so you should be able to fit that scenario in there - we are on schedule to release the beta of the new site next week so I would encourage you to log in and play with it and if it doesn't allow you do what you want to do, let me know. Thanks for your post!