Sailing has cut into my recreational drinking because I do not wish to operate a vessel under the influence, and I consider "anchor watch" to be "operating".
Tied off at the
dock, I will have wine with dinner, but only after the propane's off. My watchwords aboard are "moderation veering toward skipping it entirely". On very hot sailing days, I will allow myself a
single tin of cider or lager at the
helm, but really, I'm too paranoid to do on a 4.5 or 16 tonne
boat (I have two) what I wouldn't do in a car.
Friends in the tropics have said that certain islands have cruisers on the hook whose social life consists of boozing, sometimes to excess. That would depress me, frankly, and would be an incentive to keep moving...but then I find a lot of cruisers don't seem to
cruise so much as find a tropical bay to their liking and then just hang out for weeks or months. To each her own.
That said, on land on Friday nights, I usually have three tins of
beer or cider over four or five hours of jamming in a basement band. More than that and the playing suffers! And a decent
rum is never amiss, but only when I'm required to operate trousers and not to silence tinking halyards during a half-gale on a slick
deck at 2:30 AM (this happened once after some social frivolity, which helped to convince me I should be a light drinker if at all when aboard in any form).
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