Where Has the Cruising Counter-Culture Gone - Is It Too Late?

[smackdaddy]

+1 virginia boy.

And boatman - if you can sail a 21' Corbee from the UK to Portugal, you da man.

Now back to my wine, roasted duck, and autopilot.

[boatman61]

N I'm puttin mah teef back in dah glash....

[Brent Swain]

There is nothing to stop you or anyone else from heading out cruising in any funky boat you can find and enjoying cruising on a shoestring budget, making maximum cruising time ,and not new toys your main priority. I have been doing that for decades since the early70's, and not much has changed, except I have accumulated a few new toys over the decades. You only join the yuppie crowd or get on the treadmill of keeping up with the Joneses, by choosing to do so.
If a place wants expensive fees, just avoid such places.

[Ex-Calif]

It is readily observable that there are people of differing economic status cruising on boats.

What is not observable is the tolerance and acceptance of the different economic levels of each other. We readily stereotype the large powerboater as one who will be below decks drinking champagne while the autopilot steers the boat through the moorings creating huge wake and colliding with the less affluent.

There are the stereotypes of the minimalist liveaboard who has all the detritus of his life strewn acrross his messy decks. His boat is dirty, his sails are worn and he just simply creates a "dirty" atmosphere at the marina.

There is the expensive sailboater who never drops the docklines, Everything is spic and span on this boat cuz the guy has no skills to do anything and it is all done for him by the marina. He doesn't even haul his own ice; the boat is stocked up when he, in his little captain's hat, arrives with the champagne and caviar crowd. On the rare occasion he does drop the lines he bangs into everyone else on his way out of the marina due to his lack of boating skills. Never get the sails up, cuz he doesn't know how and motors around the bay for a couple of hours before disastrously arriving back at the slip to bang up his and our gelcoats trying to get docked again.

If you believe in stereotyping people some of the above will resonate. In reality you meet someone on the dock and we are all pretty good folk regardless of what floats our boat.

Can't we all just get along? - LOL

[Stillraining]

My aim is to have a good supply of cold beer and a bit of shade or a good supply of hot coffee and a warm cabin...who wants to share that with me is up to them...it matters not to me one way or the other.

[HHNTR111]

Maybe another way to look at it is that the counter culture is on the land and on the water, as are all the non-counter culture types.

Whether you bike, sail, RV, hike, or whatever, maybe the counter culture is really in our head.

[boatman61]

Naturists, Hells Angels, Hippies, Pagans, Born Agains, Scientologists, Vegans, Satanists, Greens, etc etc.... which one are we supposedly trying to find...

[GordMay]

I think we have to distinguish between: “counterculture", "subculture", "fringe culture", the “merely different", and/or “no culture”.

[Wotname]

And just who is in the "culture" group?

[Stillraining]

us............humans

[Pblais]

And just who is in the "culture" group?

.

Anyone not you. The answer is always yes.

[boatman61]

Aint got no Culture.....
Or maybe no ones noticed...

[speakeasy]

I’ve followed this thread for a while.

I don’t know what constituted the cruising counter-culture, being only a latter day charter cruiser, but I’m old enough to remember what the lubber version was. It was characterized by youngsters largely, but not solely, who rejected the dominant society’s values about racism (learned from the civil rights movement), imperialism (learned from the American War in Vietnam), and consumerism (learned from various novelists and social critics in the ‘60s and ‘70s).

Throughout this thread, there seems to be an assumption that counter-culture folks were simply those with few financial resources. Perhaps that is somewhat true within the cruising C-C community, but in the lubber version, many, if not most adherents were middle, upper-middle and rich kids who chose to live the simple life, in a teepee, a hogan, a ghetto, or wherever. They were often viewed with resentment and skepticism by actual poor folks for that reason. I had a wonderful sociology professor, a Scot marooned in middle America at a university after a long career in anthropology in Europe and throughout Africa. Old Doctor Watson had been a member of the communist party in England and quit, as many did, when Stalin made the pact with Hitler at the beginning of WWII. He then joined the RAF and was a combat pilot. He was on a first name basis with every head of government in Africa from his decades of research after the war. He used to scoff at the hippie-garbed grad students who fancied themselves new leftists with lines like, “You think the working class is going to identify with you with your b*lls hanging out of your cut-offs?”

The counter-culture was a self-identifying large group of the American and European youth who consciously rejected the dominant society’s values of oppression, racism and consumerism, and that embraced tolerance for just about any other sort of behavior. In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, over 3000 communes were started in the US. I only know of a few that still exist.

It was a romantic and idealistic cultural movement that dovetailed with anti-segregation, anti-war, anti-consumerist, and equal rights political movements and used pot as the social sacrament in place of booze. It was generationally based and is over, ‘tho many of us old adherents till exist with the same values.

I’m wondering where the new generation’s counter-culture is, or where it will emerge. Perhaps it will be identified as those kids who can disconnect from the omnipresent electronic media for more than a few minutes. My sense is that counter-cultures evolve and re-emerge in each era based on a disillusionment with the failures of the dominant culture. They always come back.

[Stillraining]

Originally Posted by boatman61

Aint got no Culture.....
Or maybe no ones noticed...

Boat...check between your toes dude...you've got culture....

[sailorboy1]

Great thread! Only problem is that if you are reading and posting here you are now part of the Culture! The new real counter-culture probably doesn't have computers!

By the way we have scared the orginal poster away, hasn't posted since last July!