Seasteading Option 2: Continual Commercial Cruises
Cruise ships are a widely used way to spend time at sea — approximately 30 million passengers take a cruise every year (Thanks, ChatGPT!), and these cruises tend to last for a few days to a couple weeks. There are longer cruises (some really amazing 100+ day options, basically round-the-world or world cruise itineraries, but these tend to be relatively expensive per-day. Deep-discount shorter duration cruises are the cheapest per day (especially repositioning cruises, where ships are moved between e.g. the summer market of the Mediterranean and the winter market of the Caribbean, spending days at sea).
(Disclaimer: I’ve only ever taken one cruise in my life (Holland America “Geek Cruises” with my friend’s company, ostensibly to learn Adobe Lightroom, about 12 years ago. It was fun, and the experience overall was great, but since then I’ve only done private boats and ferries, although the line between a ferry and a cruise is somewhat fuzzy.)
Most cruise ships actually spend almost all of their time “working” at sea or in a port taking on/offloading passengers or doing a port visit for paying passengers, with only limited periods of dedicated maintenance — most maintenance is done underway. They’re expensive capital assets, with many crew (on the order of 1:1 with passengers), so there is only a period of weeks to a few months per year where a given ship is taken out of service. Plus, cruise lines often operate multiple comparable ships, and there are numerous cruise lines.
Thus, a pretty obvious strategy presents itself — spending all or nearly all of one’s time on cruise ships by booking back to back cruises, preferably on the same ship but at least with the same line or with easy transfers. For a relatively low per day cost, you can have a place to live, food, maintenance, and everything else taken care of. Generally cruises are in the $100-500/day range. There are point/frequent guest programs which reduce the cost, and various discounts. Usually the people doing these long-term continual cruise plans book relatively inexpensive cabins, and often try to book in advance far enough that they can stay in the same cabin on multiple consecutive sailings.
There are a fair number of people who do this. YouTube has some interviews with them, and this guy is one of the more interesting — a structural engineer who used Covid to make massive amounts of cash as a delivery driver and entrepreneur.
The most famous of the “long term cruisers” is “Super Mario”, who has done this for approximately 20 years!
Obviously, there are some problems with this. Legally, it may complicate one’s residency situation in various countries (this depends on your country of citizenship, of residency, and any special tax considerations). Living in a small cruise ship cabin is itself physically limiting — no kitchen, very small space, constantly changing people on the rest of the ship. The demographics of most cruises are either “old people” (long cruises) or “partiers” (Caribbean and short cruises, and especially cruises with “theme or affinity groups” like LGBT). A lot of these continual cruisers, just like RVers, choose a location in the low-tax parts of the world (e.g. South Dakota or Florida as a US person) and establish residency there (a cheap apartment used infrequently), just to have some address. (I’m not sure how cruising would work as a Puerto Rico Act 22/Act 60 Individual Investor, actually.). Getting off the boat in various ports is easy for people with powerful passports like US, Canada, or EU, but might be difficult for others. Internet has historically been very expensive on cruise ships, but has gotten much cheaper recently, and one option would always be to use cellphone Internet when in range of shore.
Given the physical conditions (cramped/shared) and demographics (older) of cruise passengers, and inherent international travel, Covid really affected the cruise industry. For much of 2020, ships were held at anchor with skeleton crews, sold off, or otherwise very restricted, and that continued into 2021 and in some cases 2022. Cruise lines seem to be mostly back to normal operations now (with some additional sanitation, although Norovirus and other threats were always a reason for on-board sanitation.)
Continual cruising is probably a lifestyle most appealing to older people, or people who for a period of a year or two want to intensively travel and see a variety of coastal locations. (I’d personally love to do Alaska and Antarctic cruises; those are much harder on a private yacht, but would also be interested in some other locations if a private boat were not an option.).
An affinity group block-booking of cruises for “Seasteaders” to try it out might actually be a good idea; I think 25-50 people could book the same cruise as part of an organization with some dedicated program of lectures and workshops.
There are two other cruise ship options (the dedicated at-sea residences like ResidenSea, and buying a cruise ship and converting it to a Seastead) which I’ll probably cover later.