A Pirate Looks At 30

Well, welcome back...I guess. That last post did not go in my favor. My faithful readers turned on me and voted with Mrs. Yak. She won. No Jeep. I'm really going to have to break down and buy a car, though. Do you realize how long it has been since I have been kayaking? September. TWO months! $300 for a roof rack for our car, and I've used it once!

I Need Your Help! did prove a few things, though. Number 1: My Grandmother will ALWAYS vote in my favor. If I were to title a post, "Should I kill Everybody Who Voted Against Me?" I would be able to count on her to vote, "Yes, do you need to borrow a rifle?"

Number 2: Uncle Pink and my brother have come to the conclusion that I am a "Tree huggin' Hippie." I believe that was their words. Sheesh. I'm no Tree Hugger! Granola, maybe. To prove I'm not a "Tree Huggin' Hippie," my wife shaves her legs. So, there!

To rub salt in an open wound, my uncle told me about his Jeep Cherokee after voting against me getting a Wrangler. Yeah, well...Your name is Uncle PINK!! (In my Uncles defense, this is a really cool nickname because he happens to share a surname with Pink Floyd. To show his excellent taste in music, he and I share a fascination of Pink Floyd.) And, yes, I know Pink Floyd is the name of a band, not a person.

Have you noticed my profile mentions something about talking my wife into getting a bigger boat? Since everybody but me seems to think it's a bad idea to get a Jeep, I have begun negotiations with her about getting a boat. Surprisingly enough, a nice boat can be had for $5000-my intended down payment for a Jeep. Click on "Buy Me A Boat" in the links and do your own search for sailboats with a max price of $5000. Most of the boats will come up in the range of 25 to 30 feet long. That's a nice chunk of real estate for getting me to my dream destination-the Caribbean!

The negotiations began tonight. It went like this:
Me: Instead of getting a Jeep, can we get a boat?
Wife: Blank stare.
Me: I was planning on putting $5000 down on a Jeep. I was figuring I could use that money to buy a boat.
Wife: Where are we going to keep it?
Me: In the water at a marina.
Wife: How much will that cost?
Me: I looked into it last summer, but I don't really remember.
Wife: Well, we need to see how much insurance and slip fees will be.
End of negotiation.

That is what I have been researching tonight. Insurance will remain unknown until I pick out a boat. Evidently, insurance companies won't give a quote unless you have the specifics on a boat. So I moved on to slip fees. I found a really fancy marina in the Chesapeake Bay and decided to check it out. For $230 a month, you get a slip with electricity, water, and cable T.V. Electricity is metered at the dock and paid by the boat owner monthly. The same for water and T.V., but I wouldn't need either of those. The catch, 230 times 12 equals $2760. That has to be paid upfront.

Those prices are for a 30' boat. Marinas charge by the foot. There are some smaller marinas on the Chesapeake that don't charge nearly as much. I'm pretty sure I can find a marina that will charge less than $5 a foot per month. All I need is something to tie to and electricity to keep the batteries charged. I don't care if they have a pool.

I came across a few interesting things tonight while searching for boats and marinas. When I saw this one, I laughed so hard I thought I might wake up the day-walkers upstairs. The tag for that website is "Really Cool Amphibious Vehicles." Really cool is NOT what I was thinking while laughing at them.

On the other hand, this is really cool. A luxury submarine! To hell with sailboats, I'm getting one of these! It's 213' long with four decks. Notice, though, there aren't any photos of their submarines. That's a dead ringer they have never built one. I don't know if I trust a company that can't afford to build a prototype, or even a model, of their product that purportedly dives to 1000' for days at a time. I'll wait until Richard Branson gets one. Maybe his will go on the market at a reasonable price a few years later.

I also found a cruising boat that resembled the Enterprise. The bow was a huge bubble mostly encapsulated with a large, darkly tinted window. Nestled inside the bubble was an extremely Trekie bridge. I didn't bother bookmarking that one, it was so ridiculous. At least they had working models to take pictures of in action.

I'm having another birthday this week. This will be the 28th since that ominous Thanksgiving day in 1978. Thursday will mark my 4th Thanksgiving birthday, counting the actual day of birth. As I was typing that, I think I figured out why my grandfather sometimes calls me "turkey."

If this quarter century goes as quickly as the previous, I'll be done with this world in what seems like a couple of weeks. I've enjoyed my twenties and I'm not looking forward to my thirties. But then again, I enjoyed my teens. My twenties blew that teenie bopper crap right out of the water! I don't know if I'll be able to hold on tight enough if my thirties blast my twenties.

In my teens, I went to a fairly cool high school. I was fortunate enough to get out of school every now and then to travel all over the place. In what turned out to be a one sided deal, I fell in love for the first time. I took my first flying lessons, then blew all my flying lesson money on my first love. As hard as I tried not to, I graduated high school, got dumped by my first love, got drunk for the first time, ran out of money for flying lessons, then started college without any direction on what I wanted to do with my life. So I followed the direction of my elders, turned twenty, and decided to do something other than go to college. I could always go back later, right?

I farted around for a year, turned twenty one, got drunk for the second time, then joined the Coast Guard. Graduated bootcamp on Thanksgiving day, my birthday. 21 to 25 was lived year to year with my eye on that "End of Enlistment" date. I got to do some really cool stuff, but I made it fly by looking too far ahead. I do know what it's like to live in Alaska. Few people know the joys of driving an old Jeep across the country for a girl. None of my friends know what salt water being sprayed from an HH-60 feels like on your face, or how to perform a J-turn at 45 knots without being thrown off the boat. I have done CPR, both successfully and not, pulled people from a boat while it was sinking, and felt the pleasant sting of O.C. Pepper spray in my eyes. I played toss with a seal 25 feet under water, saw starfish clinging to the edge of a wall, and know what it's like to lose a power tool to Davey Jones.

Before 25, I met the first girl I loved that loved me back and figured I'd better hold on to that and tight! So I got married. At that point I started living more in the moment and things began slowing down. Except the years still flew by in a flash.

I sit here a few days shy of 28. I have been married for four mostly happy years: I found out I'm hard to live with, I needed more diversity in my wardrobe, and the food I was eating wasn't good for me. Giving up Ramen Noodles was the hardest part of getting married. I haven't gone back to college, although a date is set, and I know what I want to do. I haven't finished flying lessons, but I could if I wanted to. What does thirty have in store for me? A bigger boat?



Fair winds and following seas...