Should we be doing this ?
Stay at a place long enough, and you make friends. Here in Grenada (at the Tiki Bar), Patrina, Kamile, and at least 2 others know what we drink and how we like our pizza. You also meet lots of sailors. We now know more people from Hamburg, Germany than we knew in our apartment building in Washington DC.
Besides your sailing friends, you also have names for the sailors who mumbled their name or weren't interesting enough to remember.......Buddha, French Rocker, Russian Secret Police Guy, Dutch Pirate Guy, etc.
But no matter how drunk sailors get, there's a closely guarded secret they all keep............the 600 lb gorilla in the room during any conversation. No it's not "Wow, isn't that Portuguese chick hot ?" Rather, it's "Do I have enough money to be doing this long term ?" You see, look around the bar.........all the weird faces, all the strange couples and stranger situations............what do we all have in common ? None of us are working.
You meet all kinds of people with all kinds of "plans" (I'll use that term generously). One guy we met the other day had plans to sail a very damaged boat through the Panama Canal all the way to Canada. OK, what's wrong with that ? Grenada has boatyards. Fix the boat and off you go. Uh.......sorry, I forgot to mention that he doesn't have two cents to his name. He could barely pay for 3 beers at the bar. And the Panama Canal authority isn't accepting IOUs. Other than that, great plan.
This Irish guy we met in Dominica was sailing around the world on his 32 ft boat. Real "can-do" guy. Decided he's lonely and stopped in Australia to find a girl. Couple of months later he and the new hottie are sailing around the world (she had no sailing experience, but thought it "would be cool"). Where were these girls when I was in high school ?
We're coming around to the idea that money is not the sole determinant to the "can we do this" question. It's also craziness. The more sanity you have, the more money you need to sail. Not sure where that puts us.
Besides your sailing friends, you also have names for the sailors who mumbled their name or weren't interesting enough to remember.......Buddha, French Rocker, Russian Secret Police Guy, Dutch Pirate Guy, etc.
But no matter how drunk sailors get, there's a closely guarded secret they all keep............the 600 lb gorilla in the room during any conversation. No it's not "Wow, isn't that Portuguese chick hot ?" Rather, it's "Do I have enough money to be doing this long term ?" You see, look around the bar.........all the weird faces, all the strange couples and stranger situations............what do we all have in common ? None of us are working.
You meet all kinds of people with all kinds of "plans" (I'll use that term generously). One guy we met the other day had plans to sail a very damaged boat through the Panama Canal all the way to Canada. OK, what's wrong with that ? Grenada has boatyards. Fix the boat and off you go. Uh.......sorry, I forgot to mention that he doesn't have two cents to his name. He could barely pay for 3 beers at the bar. And the Panama Canal authority isn't accepting IOUs. Other than that, great plan.
This Irish guy we met in Dominica was sailing around the world on his 32 ft boat. Real "can-do" guy. Decided he's lonely and stopped in Australia to find a girl. Couple of months later he and the new hottie are sailing around the world (she had no sailing experience, but thought it "would be cool"). Where were these girls when I was in high school ?
We're coming around to the idea that money is not the sole determinant to the "can we do this" question. It's also craziness. The more sanity you have, the more money you need to sail. Not sure where that puts us.