Hi All,
I’ve hemmed and hawed over whether to join in on the discussions here. TaoJones has asked me a few times because he thinks I’d have something to add to the community. I’m not sure about that, but have decided to give it a shot anyway. We've sailed a few miles and know a bit about just dropping out and going, so I guess maybe that's where my "expertise" would lie.
During our first
cruise I avoided taking part in this place. Frankly it seemed to me as if all I would do is spend my time defending myself, pointing out blatant lies, and trying to explain my sense of
humor. Tao calls my
humor self-deprecating, and I guess that’s exactly what it is. I don’t take myself very seriously. I don’t pretend to know it all. And I really don’t give a toss what anybody except my wife and daughter think of me. So for those reasons it hardly seemed worth it to join in. But it’s been a few years now and we’ve got a
new boat, and, well...
So I thought I’d just jump right in and use this thread as a starting point. I’ll address some of the comments that have been made already, and in the future if anybody has any questions or comments I’ll do my best to hit on those too.
Ali and I have just bought our second
boat. We join a select few in the ranks of
boat owners who have gone from
catamaran to
monohull. I’m sure more than a few people are wondering why we would do that. It really comes down to two things. One:
price. We paid $48k for this boat. $157k for the cat. The one thing I always want in a boat is the ability to lose it at any time and not have it destroy me financially. We don’t insure our boats so this means paying cash and being able to absorb the possibility that one day it will be worth zero. On our first trip we had one financial threshold and now we’ve got another.
Two: it is a new challenge for us, and to me that’s what life is about. Aside from our eight hours of sailing
classes in a J24 we’ve never sailed on a
monohull. We sailed around the world and spent a lot of time drinking
beer in friend’s monohull cockpits, but we never went sailing in one of them.
Yes, we bought this boat sight unseen and without a
survey. We had a friend check the boat out for us and ultimately decided that we felt this was such a good deal that we didn’t want to miss it. We made the offer the first day. As for surveyors, I think they are a waste of
money. We paid Charles Kanter to
survey our Wildcat and I think we all know how that turned out. His recommendations on our survey were to install a tie down strap for the
batteries, and to tighten a loose bolt on the
rudder post. That’s it. Not long after that we discovered that basically the entire boat was delaminated. I wouldn’t pay one of these guys ten cents, much less five hundred dollars, to step foot on my boat again. I’d rather put that
money to
work fixing the problems that I find.
sneuman - I think you’ve got a rather inflated sense of how much money there is to be made off of a self-published book. I make about a buck on the Kindle versions, and about $2.50 on the print. I think we all know the only way to make real money on a sailing story is to sink in a storm and be rescued days later.
slomotion - You make a good point. The
circumnavigation was our goal. When we set out we figured we’d go around the world and then right back to Chicago to
work. But about halfway around we decided we really liked the traveling aspect of the trip. Not so much the sailing, but the getting off the boat and being immersed in a new place. The
Med is when we decided we wanted to do the VW trip. Now that a few years have gone by we’ve sort of come full circle. With a baby now we’ve decided that the cruising lifestyle is the way we want to raise our girl. We want her to be outdoorsy, independent, and free from as much media and advertising as possible. We don’t know how long it will last, but for now that’s our goal.
GordMay - Quick math: 14,500 posts x 12 minute avg/post = 174,000 min. / 60 = 2,900 hours / 16 waking hours in a day = 181 entire days spent sharing these sorts of insights. Wow.
Kia Ora - Now that is a seriously
funny one-liner. That’s my kind of humor.
Anyway all, Ali and I are moving aboard our
new boat in a few days. We’ll live in the Bay Area for a while. We may or may not make it down to
Mexico this year. We don’t know for sure as some minor
medical issues may keep us in the States through the
winter. But either way we’ll be living on the
water, fixing up a thirty year old boat, and raising a baby girl. Should be fun. And you’re all welcome to join us either through our website or here. If you’ve got questions or comments feel free to post them here or e-mail us directly any time.
Later on.
Pat
bumfuzzle.com