Still being charted
Every other page on this site describes a plan. This one admits what's still a guess. We're publishing the parts we haven't settled because the people who can actually settle them — captains, tradespeople, anyone who's split a boat's costs and regretted the fine print — are the same people we're trying to get aboard. A plan that survives their objections is worth more than a polished one that's never met any.
Eight, so far
No ranking, no order of importance — just the arguments we haven't finished having. Read them, then tell us where we've got it wrong.
Living aboard cheaply pulls toward one kind of boat, crew, and money — slow maintenance, low overhead, people who get along for years in small spaces. Running charters pulls toward another: boats that have to earn, crews built for guest turnover, a schedule set by bookings instead of by whoever's aboard that week.
Same hull, opposite pressures. V1 has to pick one and be excellent at it, rather than try to be both and do neither well.
Real ownership means a stake in the hull, a vote, a claim if it sells. A berth means the right to live and work aboard — no stake, no vote, nothing to sell later. Both will exist on Plundr. The open question is which one a captain offers by default.
Default to equity and you screen out people who only wanted a bunk for a season. Default to a berth and, sooner or later, someone who assumed they were buying in finds out otherwise the hard way.
An LLC per boat is the obvious answer — standard, well understood, easy for a lawyer to draft. A trust handles succession better but costs more to set up. A co-op spreads liability differently, and most boat lawyers have never drafted one.
Plundr stays off the title no matter which a crew picks. What we owe them is a recommendation, and the test for it isn't which structure is cleanest on the day it's formed — it's which one survives a crew member leaving on bad terms.
Hours spent sanding and rewiring. Capital put in for the engine rebuild. Revenue the boat earned on a charter season. All three need to land on a ledger every crew member can actually see, updated as it happens, not reconstructed from memory during a dispute.
That ledger doesn't exist yet. Until it does, "equity" on this platform is a word people use in conversation, not a number anyone can point to.
Historic pirate crews elected their captain, and elected a quartermaster to stand between captain and crew when the two disagreed — closer to actual democracy than the era gets credit for. Some version belongs in every boat's articles.
What's unresolved is narrower: does the captain keep a standing veto on anything that touches safety at sea, or does even that go to a vote once there's a quartermaster to mediate it? We lean toward keeping the veto. We haven't tested that against a real quartermaster arguing the other side.
A hull isn't liquid. You can't sell a fifth of a sailboat on a Tuesday. Buyout terms, notice periods, and who's responsible for finding the next person to buy in — none of it is standardized yet, and every captain who's tried to write these terms alone has landed somewhere different.
One pilot vessel. One crew. One season. The point of picking just one isn't caution for its own sake — it's finding every problem on this page before a single line of the platform gets locked down as "how it works." Whatever breaks on the water on boat one gets rewritten before boat two exists.
A buy-in filters for seriousness — someone unwilling to put money down usually isn't ready to put in the work either. But money isn't character. It screens out the broke and the impulsive. It does nothing to screen out the difficult, the absent, or the person who's great until the bilge pump fails at two in the morning.
What vetting looks like past the check clearing is still open. Interviews help. References help more. Neither is a guarantee, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
Borrowed, not invented
An elected captain, and an elected quartermaster to mediate between captain and crew — genuine early democracy, two hundred years before the word got fashionable. Plundr's job is to supply the template. The verdict on how a boat governs itself belongs to the crew that sails it, never to us.
The captain commanded the ship in a fight. The quartermaster commanded nearly everything else — chosen by the same vote as the captain, answerable to the same crew, and the one officer with standing to overrule the captain's word.
How a golden-age crew split its power
Tell us where we're wrong
The sign-on form has a field built for exactly this — not a general comments box, a real question asking which of these you'd answer differently. If you've run a boat, lived aboard one, or shared ownership of anything with people you had to keep trusting, we want the argument. Start there.
We didn't finish the chart on purpose. Help us fill in what's still blank.