Great question, if only there was an etiquette!
We
love visitors to drop in and never get tired of admiring comments but pretty often we're trying to accomplish a
boat job that day and so would like to socialise later in the day.
Those who are living like they're on permanent holiday sometimes struggle with our attitude. I suspect these are often people who get all their
boat jobs done for them when they're at their next marina stop. We prefer the
diy as you go approach.
Funnily enough no matter how busy we are a friendly and open approach always goes down well and such people notice you're busy and suggest a later meet. Conversely when a negative whingey person stops by to tell us how we're doing it all wrong they're often hard to shake off. Since you don't want to suggest a later 'date' and being inconsiderate in the first place they sometimes don't take the hints, we tend to get pretty direct at this point and sometimes we've had to get pretty brutally rude (we are British so that's a low bar).
It comes down to being as simple as this. If you're positive we'd love to meet you but notice if we're busy and make a plan for later. If you want to come over to tell us lots of bad stuff then we're happy to find out in our own time.
During our first few boatie meetings I didn't realise that when invited onboard, people usually mean into the cockpit. It's a much later step to be invited inside. I didn't notice and was just going straight in! Horrified now but I genuinely just didn't know or think.
Ruth