B.O.A.T.

Whether sailors or motor boaters, Cruisers are pretty good at making fun of themselves.  Sailors joke about how they spend more time motoring than sailing.  Motor boaters joke about how they spend more timing fixing their boats than going out on them. And all Cruisers have their favorite interpretation of the acronym “B.O.A.T.”

A former neighbor, Josi, swears it stands for “Best Outdoor Activity Together”, a nice sentiment.

Almost any boater will tell you it actually stands for “Bring On Another Thousand” (as in dollars). It’s a known fact that boat parts cost about five times as much as similar auto parts.

Gary, one of our blog readers and a former co-worker of Cathryn’s, tells us it really stands for either “Beer Often Alters Trajectory” or else “Beer Only Amplifies Technique”, depending on whether you were able to properly navigate back to your home dock after stopping for a beer somewhere.

Finally, Corey, our current dock neighbor from Connecticut, tells us all of the above are wrong; it really stands for (and this one rings most true to us at the moment):  “Broken, Or About To”, as every time we turn around we find something else is broken that wasn’t already on The Dreaded List (of repairs).

We keep consoling ourselves that boats are actually well-constructed for a pretty harsh environment:  sitting in salt water, being subjected to high winds, yanking around on the end of an anchor chain, and getting bashed about at high speed on waves while underway, equivalent to what it might be like for a house to be subjected to an earthquake every week and being expected to survive without broken plumbing, electrical connections or structural damage.  When looked at that way, it seems like “Next To Me” is doing pretty well for a 25-year-old girl!