Why don't people use their boats?

[markpierce]

The sixties in the San Francisco Bay were exciting times. Often, several hundred boats would compete in a race. The WWII generation made it so. Happy to have participated as a teenager.

[zeehag]

lol marina del rey the yuppie capital of world.
all the folks had to have boats bigger and better than their neighbors.
unfortunately some of the neighbors were ed mc mahon and other wealthy folks and yuppies lost ass in housing shuffle and other bad choices made.
boats sit in marinas in del rey, actually there are 10,000 slips there, unless they ditched some 6k slips since 1991, when i was in tahiti marina, neighbors with ed mcmahon, dea, fbi, and mafia boats..lol was interesting, as no one could leave slip on main channel, where our slip was, on a weekend when around 5000 of those 10k boats would parade out and then back into marina area at speed. yes , more than 5 kts. try to leave the slip...rodlmffao.
oh yes. do not forget that when folks die, many times the rent is paid via a trust fund for the boat.
no slips for you.
there are also 10k slips in port of lost angels, wherein many sit, yes, with trustafarian issues......

ditto san diego......

go figger...

[Dockhead]

I don't judge people by how much they use their boats. Some people just can't right now, at this stage of their lives. Time is a more precious and more limited thing than money, and different people in different situations have radically more or less of it. Next year might be completely different -- you never know.

I use my boat a whole lot, but it is not because I am a supercool ace real he-man sailorman. It's just because I happen to have work which allows me to be where I want to be most of the time, which is generally on the boat.

And my boat is neither small nor cheap, so so much for those rules.

I live aboard about four months a year, and sail a few thousand miles a year.

I have been living aboard this year continuously since April, not counting regular business trips. I shredded my principle headsail in August and won't be able to sail properly until I get new sails this winter. But that doesn't stop me from going out -- I can sail a little even without the yankee, if the wind is right, or I can motorsail, or even just motor. Since my mooring has no water or shore power, I have to leave to get water from time to time anyway (and yesterday, fuel, since I am heating and generating electricity with diesel fuel). So I typically take off somewhere every weekend. Never very far, and almost always single handed, usually in the dark and in bad weather (as it is November and latitude 50N+) but it's still great to be out on the water. Sometimes in calm weather, I just go out and drop the anchor off the beach in the Solent somewhere, and sit on board and work all day, and spend the night. Sometimes I go into Cowes or Yarmouth and enjoy being on a walk-on berth, go out to taste the flesh-pots, and so forth. Just messing around in boats. But it's fairly accidental that my work allows me to live this way.

[goat]

Sssssshhhhh..... You guys are going to ruin everything. When I got a slip in Redondo I thought boat traffic would be horrible. Not so. I like the fact hardly anyone sails.

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[Group9]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

Cos they're too big.

.

I really think it is that simple. In my marina in Miami, there was an 85 foot Broward yacht that didn't leave the slip in the entire 3 years I was there. I only saw the owner on it twice, both times for a long weekend. He was in his 30's with a wife and two children who looked to be 8-12 years old.

The harbor master and I prepared it for a hurricane once, (the owner didn't even bother to come out or send anyone to check on it).

But there was also a lot of smaller boats that never left. One, a 30 foot cruiser, owned by a hairdresser had us laughing our butts off. He showed up one weekend, after not having been on the boat for two years, and was SHOCKED! that nothing happened when him and all of his friends jumped on the boat and they turned the ignition switch on....... and nothing happened.