Boat Envy (or not)

Posted: August 24, 1:17 pm | (permalink) | (0 comments)

It was amusing to me to see that last week’s “Home of the Week” feature was really two homes, one on land and one a boat. Finally, in the boat part at least, something I could relate to. Umm, yeah, until I scrolled through the slideshow and saw the glossy finishes and thespace. I compared their 44-foot trawler to our 33-foot sailboat and a tweak of jealousy. Okay, more than just a tweak, for a moment. But the purpose of these stories is not to serve as benchmarks to compare our measures of success against our neighbors (and inevitably make readers feel envious and inadequate). I can’t afford that luxurious a boat but I can search this article for ideas and inspiration … and realized that that is this is the real purpose of stories of homes featured in magazines and newspapers. Whether afloat or on land, these stories are meant as sources of ideas.

So many of the gorgeous land homes are set in acres of gorgeous grounds, or on bluffs overlooking the sea. But there’s a unique twist to this paradigm if your home is a boat. The greatest magic of this living aboard life is that it’s such a great equalizer – that the most important things about this life are the things we have in common, and many of the land-based status symbols and boundaries disappear. As we traveled the ICW last year, million-dollar trawlers and little skiffs shared the same anchorages and were swept by the same currents, as we were. The overwhelming orange and magenta sunset in a marsh in Georgia, loud with crickets and birds, that painted the sky one night last November was just as awesome in a rowboat as the cockpit of our boat.