Crappy sandals and a sock on steroids...

Jimmy Buffett (as I recall) made a joke in concert about shoes these days costing more than his first pickup...

Just for the record, I paid $200 for my first car and the thought of paying that sort of money for shoes does make me go just a little... bonkers.

Of course, down here living on a boat, I hardly ever wear "shoes" in the accepted sense and socks are something that one must search out as they are stored in inaccessible nooks on the boat when socks are needful for trips to the real world. In my world, such as it is, we wear sandals!

But it is getting harder and harder to find decent sandals these days as the costs keep going up with what appears to be a corresponding decline in quality.

Teva's for a long time were the gold standard but I began to find that they seemed to be on the prices go up quality goes down spiral. So I switched to Columbia Sportswear sandals which impressed me greatly and I had a couple of pairs that were both super comfortable, gave lots of support and were non-skid in all the right ways...

As soon as I got used to the Columbia Sportswear sandals, lo and behold now it seems that every sandal I buy winds up self-destructing halfway into it's break-in period. The sole unglues and then I wind up walking around making silly slapping noises... Is this anyway for an $80 sandal to behave?

Of course, I could always send it back but shipping stuff back from the Caribbean almost always costs more than the item in question. So it's out with the 3M 5200 which will hold anything together... Except sandals! Throw in that the weird flocking stuff they put on these sandals to make them look like imitation leather of some sort wears off faster than you can say... WTF!

So the current quest and Holy Grail is a decent sandal for life on a boat that does not cost silly money... Help would be appreciated!
One sandal that I find super interesting but no one has for sale anywhere I can actually try them on is the Vibram sandal/shoe that has toes! They are just weird enough to actually work but have any of the Boat Blog readership actually used them? Still they do go for silly prices...$75 or more for a sock on steroids?