Confessions Of A Boat Bum

6:30 AM

S dropped by the marina Friday night for a hastily-arranged discussion about the Blogosphere, and was adventurous enough to take a whirlwind tour of Calypso.

An encounter with dock spiders along the way (spiders must be attracted to water; they leave webs everywhere; even between boats) foretold that things would go badly indeed. Her first impression was quite vivid as she glanced down the slip and got her first glimpse of my sweet Calypso:

“It’s so small!"

Yikes. I protested No, no that’s not the case at all … it just looks small from the outside. There’s a TV with surround sound, lots of windows and a galley (kitchen) with electric appliances. And two 220hp Crusader engines! But S wasn’t having any, none of it, and underscored the rest of the tour with an unhappy series of winces and head-shakes, which she summed up succinctly upon disembarking:

“I could never live on a boat.”

For about an hour after she left I looked around Calypso and wondered if S thought I was crazy, moving from an over-large house to fiberglass accommodations not much larger than a phone booth. Was she right?

Then the awful truth coalesced into a crushing blow.

S didn’t think I was crazy. No, she felt sorry for me … which caused me to simultaneously realize I’ve become an incorrigible, no-good-sense bona fide boat bum.

A Boat’s Not So Bad, Not Really. (I think)

Sure it’s smaller than a house, but that means there’s less to straighten and clean up. There’s less room to fill to overflowing with furnishings, accessories, keepsakes and unnecessary clothes … and less room to lose stuff (like car keys and the TV remote).

My point is that boats can go places your house can’t, and there’s more room on the water than inside anybody’s house.

There’s no privacy at a marina. Yep, there’s dozens of other boats tied here at the dock but during the week there’s no one else around, so I’ve practically got the whole place to myself. And on weekends, it turns out Calypso’s engines are louder (and go faster) than anybody’s stereo.

Stuff breaks a lot on boats. It does around a house, too.

Boats are expensive to maintain. Not compared to keeping up a house and a car or two. And my utilities aren’t ever more than $50 a month … typically less than half that.

Boats bob up and down all the time. But I like that part.

A boat can leak, sink, capsize or break apart during a storm … you’ve told us so. I think everything tastes better with Frito’s Scoops and bleu cheese crumbles.

OK, Stop Polishing The Apples And Tell Us All The Bad Parts

There’s just three little things.

Doing laundry is the absolute worst. It’s too expensive and takes too much time using laundromats Shoot, even Ben and The Kid have room for a combo washer/dryer … but Calypso’s Mediterranean aesthetic dismisses such practicalities as disagreeable and unfashionable. And I know better than to argue with an attractive woman … especially when we’ve been getting along so splendidly otherwise.

Need some ice? From a dorm-size fridge? Forget about it. In fact, I’m no longer sure what ice cubes are good for, anyway.

Finally, my last gripe is that it’s almost a 40-mile roundtrip drive to church from the marina (my perspective is it’d be a lot easier to move the auditorium closer to the marina than it would be to move the lake, but that’s just my own selfishness). Besides, the journey is always worth it.

You know what? She’s right; I could never live on a boat, either

Well, I’m open-minded and flexible enough to realize that if I ever put on the ring (especially if kids ever came into the picture) then I’d have to give in, and acknowledge Richard Dreyfuss’s famous line from Jaws:

“We’re gonna need a bigger boat!”

Whether you live in a boat, a house overlooking the country club and the 18^th fairway, an apartment close to campus, a mud hut without plumbing or running water, the penthouse in Trump Tower featuring breathtaking twilight views of Manhattan or in a mobile home under a deer stand, today’s situation is only temporary, after all.