Voyaging belongs to seamen and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in.
- Sterling Hayden
The greatest fear about the idea of a VolksCruiser type boat and lifestyle I hear voiced is whether or not they will fit in with the cool kids cruising community.
I get that. Face it, nobody wants to return to the world of high school cliques and despair (well, unless they can return as BMOC or Homecoming Queen and some do seem to try). The thing is, if you're worried about fitting in that's just your spidey sense telling you that you might not.
Your spidey sense just might be right as it happens...
The cruising community is composed of any number of cliques, gangs, posses, clans, and other assorted assemblages of folks just like high school.
So yeah, there are a lot of folks who you may not fit in with just like high school. That said, there are lots of folks who you'll find to be just your sort.
I remember talking to a guy once who told me he had bought an Island Packet because he thought it was the perfect boat to fit in... Somewhat upmarket but not pretentious, sorta/kinda traditional but modern, a semi-anonymous boat that should fit in at any anchorage or so he thought. The problem, as he told it, was he apparently had bought the wrong dinghy and he felt ostracised, even within the Island Packet clan, because, since he liked to row, he'd bought a Trinka dinghy... The happy part of the story is that being a rower and Trinka guy he met a lot of like-minded folks, made some good friends in the process, and became one of the cool kids...
While sailing our Loose Moose and Loose Moose 2 (boats guaranteed to scandalize any anchorage) we did run across people who had issues but they tended to be, generally speaking, fools, idiots, and people of limited vision... Certainly not folks we'd choose to hang out with in any case. On the other hand, having an "odd" or "different" boat opened doors to a lot of great people we never would have met if we'd been in just another fiberglass bleach bottle.
So, not to worry...
Everyone fits in somewhere.
I get that. Face it, nobody wants to return to the world of high school cliques and despair (well, unless they can return as BMOC or Homecoming Queen and some do seem to try). The thing is, if you're worried about fitting in that's just your spidey sense telling you that you might not.
Your spidey sense just might be right as it happens...
The cruising community is composed of any number of cliques, gangs, posses, clans, and other assorted assemblages of folks just like high school.
So yeah, there are a lot of folks who you may not fit in with just like high school. That said, there are lots of folks who you'll find to be just your sort.
I remember talking to a guy once who told me he had bought an Island Packet because he thought it was the perfect boat to fit in... Somewhat upmarket but not pretentious, sorta/kinda traditional but modern, a semi-anonymous boat that should fit in at any anchorage or so he thought. The problem, as he told it, was he apparently had bought the wrong dinghy and he felt ostracised, even within the Island Packet clan, because, since he liked to row, he'd bought a Trinka dinghy... The happy part of the story is that being a rower and Trinka guy he met a lot of like-minded folks, made some good friends in the process, and became one of the cool kids...
While sailing our Loose Moose and Loose Moose 2 (boats guaranteed to scandalize any anchorage) we did run across people who had issues but they tended to be, generally speaking, fools, idiots, and people of limited vision... Certainly not folks we'd choose to hang out with in any case. On the other hand, having an "odd" or "different" boat opened doors to a lot of great people we never would have met if we'd been in just another fiberglass bleach bottle.
So, not to worry...
Everyone fits in somewhere.
