Over at a forum I follow there was some passing mention of "Real Cruisers" as opposed to those (who I guess) were not real cruisers...
The whole "I-live-on-a-sailboat-and-sail-places" gig is not the homogeneous group it once was and there are many sub-groups in the mix and, to put it bluntly, not all of them play well together.
So how do you define a real cruiser?
Some would say you are only a real cruiser if you are in the same socio-economic bracket... others would say that unless you sail hard and fast you don't quite belong... Others might say that being a WASP is a big part of it... I could go on but it gets both boring and depressing... Humans really do seem to love making categories and putting people in little boxes.
Our last boat, Loose Moose 2, was something of a freak show and really, really pissed off no small number of people. This situation often drove me nuts, but was a considerable blessing in disguise in that it was something of a bigot detector of the first order and to our benefit kept most of the fools, incompetents and people of limited vision on the other side of the anchorage.
Life was good on Loose Moose 2...
The fact is that there are a lot of really good people out cruising and, as far as I'm concerned, if they are doing it on a beat up CAL 20 with super miniscule budget and having to work along the way to provide for their needs or on a Super Custom Whatever 65 with an overflowing trust fund, they are all the same to me (though truth be told more often than not I find the cheapseats cruisers to be a whole lot more interesting as those trust fund folks are always so depressed...).
Whatever group we folks on boats less than a mega-yacht fall into we still tend to be perceived as trailer trash (and face it, if I were living on land I'd be living in an Airstream) to those ashore whether it is a beat up old CAL 20 or an Amel Super Maramu ... Which is no bad thing to keep in mind when deciding that the new boat in the anchorage is "not one of us".
