Captain of My Own Yacht (for This Weekend, Anyway) John Van Beekum for The New York Times Philip Burroughs, a director of a fractional-ownership company associated with a yacht maker, said consciousness about the costs of running the boat made the owners of yacht shares better about using the time allotted to them. Tom O. Hansen, a marketing executive, walked into the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., boat show in 2003 and did what many boat enthusiasts do: he gawked at a dream yacht, in this case an 85-foot Azimut that cost $4.5 million. Then he did something less common: he signed up to own part of it with seven other wealthy men who had never had to share a boat before. "I was still working," Mr. Hansen said. I didn't have time to spend more than five to six weeks on a boat anyhow. It fit my lifestyle and my needs perfectly. These days it seems that just about any luxury toy - from ski houses to private jets - can be divided into shares and sold to people who are willing to have less control over when they can use it in exchange for having more of something than they could afford on their own. Buying a share of a yacht is just another iteration of fractional ownership, but it struck me, frankly, as one fraught with the potential for frustration, if not lawsuits. The owners of large yachts that I know derive as much pleasure from the idea of being the owner as they do from cruising or sailing their boat. Sharing is not part of this. Yet there are plenty of good reasons not to buy a boat. They are expensive to keep, from fuel to maintenance to storage, and people do not use them as much as they think they will. There are now several companies betting there are enough wealthy enthusiasts who see yacht ownership this way and are willing to hand over millions of dollars to own part of a luxury yacht without all of the headaches. There are many more companies whose business is based on people paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for essentially a timeshare in a boat. This is essentially the case that companies like Liquidity YachtShares are making. Brian Vincenti, its founder and president, said Liquidity had two programs: shared ownership or shared leasing for anything from a 23-foot fishing boat to a 100-foot yacht. At first, I was not sure if the notion of yacht sharing signaled a return to aspiration for things grander than we can afford or the opposite: a realization that owning a month's worth of a yacht - big or small - is more practical that paying for all of a boat that will be idle the other 11 months. Philip Burroughs, director of Sanlorenzo Shares, a fractional-ownership company associated with the Italian yacht maker Sanlorenzo, said it was the latter in 2002 when, at a different company, he sold shares in a 62-foot Fairline worth $1.8 million. "We thought this would appeal to the person who could afford the $180,000 or $200,000 boat but wanted something more," he said. To our surprise, every single owner on that first boat could have bought the whole boat. These people were just smart business people. They didn't want to pay to have the boat sitting there and pay the crew. This consciousness about the costs of running the boat made the owners better about using the time allotted to them, he said: "If they have to think about scheduling they use it more." Mr. Burroughs is now trying to find five people willing to pay $1.6 million each for shares in a 92-foot Sanlorenzo and an additional $11,000 a month to cover expenses. Fuel is extra. This outlay will entitle them to six weeks of use per year. After five years, the boat will be sold and the proceeds will be divided up. While this may sound extravagant, it does not seem like such an awful deal to a certain subset of enthusiast. Michael Crabb, an entrepreneur in Boca Raton, Fla., who has been a part-owner of a yacht in the past, said he calculated how owning a boat this way would save him money - or lose him less. "If I put $10 million into a boat, I put $1 million a year into managing that boat," Mr. Crabb said. Five years down the road, that's $15 million. What am I going to get out of that boat when I sell it? $5 million? How many weeks have I been able to use it? Thirty? Maybe 40? I have all the headaches, I got 40 weeks of use, and I lost $10 million.