Warning...

thoughts on the boat show are my personal musings...your mileage may vary.

The boat show was the expected good time though I was surprised at my reaction to the big Gunboat. It was massive, 70+ feet, clearly well built and with a basic layout I think right for a Cat. But the philosophy behind it was so blatantly in-your-face, so "mine is bigger than yours," that it just left me cold. A boat whose arrogance completely overwhelmed its elegance. Even if I did hit the lottery I couldn't imagine myself living on or sailing a Gunboat.

The Atlantic 57 had the same air about it, though not quite to the same degree. I know they were both presented as performance oriented boats, and I usually have a soft spot for anything designed and built to go fast. But something about these things just struck me wrong. Whatever it is I love about sailing, I couldn't find a hint of it built into these hulls.

The last boat we boarded was the new Discovery 50. I suspect it sails like a condominium with its in-mast furling main, single head sail, wide hulls and large salon. But the inside space was just about perfect. If it took a couple of extra days to get somewhere no one on board would mind. Still a "too-much" kind of boat, at least it didn't slap me upside the head with pretence and 'tude.

We didn't entirely shun the mono hulls, even after our NY adventure sail. I took a shine to the Dufour 405. Deb thought its interior looked like a hotel room. (And she's right, it did.) She liked the Passport 475CC. I took her word on its interior since I couldn't get my gimpy self down the companionway ladder with the crowd. (All of the sales folks were very tolerant of me limping around the various decks. I'm sure a couple of them were holding their breath at times, waiting for the loud splash.)

Maybe it is just my general mood after the crash, but the show as a whole left me with a bit of an "outsider" feeling. The boats were trick, shinny, loaded with goodies, marketed to within an inch of the tops of their masts; and somehow gave the impression they were quite content to stay tied to a dock, Netflix running on the big screen TV. It was like the salt smell had been scrubbed completely out of the air, the ocean just something to hold the hulls up out of the mud. Or maybe it was that the prices of these things flat sucked the air right out of my lungs, blurring any thought of real boats sailing in a real world of wind, weather and wave. Anyway, it felt like the sailing got left out of the sailboat show.

It will be good to get on little Nomad this weekend, put some canvas up to catch a little air, look around and see real water (even if it is just our landlocked lake).