THE BOAT BUG

Obsessed. it’s the word that best describes my boat habit. I’d just finished a full day of reading, writing and editing all sorts of stories about boats. Most people I know don’t necessarily like thinking about their work after hours, nevertheless engaging full-throttle in the subject matter, but there I was, having an after-dinner coffee, sitting with my laptop and scrolling through boats for sale. I fell in love about 10 times in the hour-plus I sat there. ¶ One of my dogs, Rhodie, sat next to me, his head on my lap, staring longingly at the screen and then back at me. I swear he was trying to say: “Dude, you did this stuff all day. How about some fetch, man?” ¶ It’s a problem. I’m not currently in the market for a new boat, but I like to keep connected, and I can’t help but look and learn about boats till the proverbial cows come home. Luckily, I surround myself with like-minded friends, so when we start talking boats, I feel it’s more group therapy than an issue requiring professional help. ¶ There’s also a genetic component. For my dad’s birthday recently, my sister, my brother and I commissioned a model of his boat. Building this thing was almost as involved as building a full-size vessel. There were countless images taken to give the model builders enough detail to reproduce the boat accurately on a one-tenth scale. There was the builder sending images back and asking, “How does this look?” before tweaking some more. ¶ When the model arrived, all of us were handily impressed with the accuracy. Even the tiny gauges had the correct brand logos painstakingly hand-painted. We needed to zoom in with a camera to see the detail, and it was all there. ¶ But being a boat-centric family, it didn’t take long for us to notice a couple of design liberties that the model builder took here and there. Let’s call them enhancements. Not that anyone else would ever notice, but they didn’t miss my dad’s eyes, or ours. Overall, though, it was an incredible replica. ¶ Driving home from Dad’s birthday party, I was thinking about those enhancements. The next morning, I opened my laptop and started searching for similar-style boats to see if I could find any that had them, and what they would look like in real life. And this month, I’ll be in Miami surrounded by 2,000 vessels at the boat shows. I’m sure I’ll fall in love at least 10 more times. I know, it’s a problem.

I surround myself with like-minded friends, so when we start talking boats, I feel it’s more group therapy than an issue requiring professional help.