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Sinking Joy
April 27th, 2009While cruising in a 38′ ketch down Florida’s stately Indian River, I had a revelation that a lifetime on and around boats should have come sooner to this cowboy’s alleged mind (but then again, a yachting cowboy is an odd concept that might be a revelation to others).
What I finally realized is that there are no happy boat owners. Owning a watercraft is like having a kid. They are expensive, disruptive, routinely annoying and unreliable entities that owners suffer in order to experience occasional fleeting joy.
Indeed, among yachtsmen and other people of suspect mental stability, an age old joke is that ‘boat’ is actually an acronym for ‘break out another thousand’ as in another thousand dollars. Also like children, boats tend to be temperamental and prone to tantrums of unexplainable origin. They leak like infants and can be moody like teenagers. I once encountered a Criss Craft behaved like a girl with PMS.
And like kids, grown men will dote upon them endlessly and sacrifice everything for their upkeep.
There are no happy boat owners, but they don’t seem to mind … much.
