Reply To: Living Aboard a Boat

Lior: Yes, I’ve read a good number of them. I’ve got them on my computer. (Not much room for hardbound books aboard. The best investment we ever made was for a 30TB hard drive that we copy everything onto. (Because we read a lot and listen to music all the time, and analog books, movies, pictures and music take up a LOT of room.)

Golfer: Well, living near those places are nice, I’ll admit. But nothing can beat the view I wake up to every morning, or being rocked to sleep by the waves at night. We’ve managed to keep kosher all the time we’ve been aboard. Oh, and we’re always floating in a kosher mikvah in one form or another..(It’s certainly a natural water source.)

Funnybone: I retired from the Navy after 30 years of service as a mustang Lt.Commander. (That’s an enlisted man that advanced to officer.) Right now, I’m a free-lance graphic designer. I think I mentioned earlier that my wife’s a luthier. (She builds and repairs stringed instruments of all types. From mandolins to bouzoukis, from violins to double bases. We have examples of these hung all about the boat (and had a heck of a time keeping the kids off of them when they were little). When we’re out on an excursion she shows them to folks and takes orders that she’ll build in her shop. We have a permanent home berth that we purchased several years ago where she keeps her workshop.

And yes our kids were home-schooled for a bit. But being kids in a military family, they were also bounced about from school to school, too. But we don’t really have to worry about that too much now. One son’s a sophomore in college, and the other is a senior in high school. Our daughter’s 10 month’s old, so we’ve got a few years before we have to worry about her. (We never thought we’d have to worry about midnight feedings at our age.)

The best place to vacation? That’s a tall order. In our opinion is anyplace on the water of course. 🙂 You can get an entirely different view of places from the water. There are some place I’ve seen on the Missouri river where sheer cliffs tower over the boat and fall straight to the water. Other places on little tributaries of the Ohio ricer where the river closes in on each side of you and you can’t hear any road noise or other sounds of people and you can imagine the river as it was before any people had set foot there. One thing we do is find out where tourist season is at it’s height in an area where we’re going and make sure we go there when it’s over. Since we live way down below the Mason-Dixon line, we go north in the summer. You might laugh, but this summer it got up to 106deg. here at 100% humidity with a heat index of 112deg. And that temperature lasts for months.

Actually, some of the nicest little towns we stopped in were along the Erie canal. Upstate New York reminds me a lot of New England. When folks there heard my southern accent (which I can switch off at will) they were even nicer and went out of their way to be accommodating. Something which does NOT happen in the city. When I used my southern accent there, most people automatically subtracted 30 I.Q. points. One fellow even offered to hail a cab for me stating, “You’ll never figure it out for yourself.” What? I think the most condescending attitude of all came from our fellow Jews. Most just couldn’t grasp the idea that there were Jews here in the south. (The shul in the town where I berth my boat has been here almost 200 years. It’s true that most of the orthodox left during the depression, but there are still plenty of reform and conservative congregations.) I think they figured I should be dressed in a tin jacket, bib overalls and clodhoppers. One yutz going so far as to say you’ll have to explain this to your husband later during the kiddush after services. Again, what? Yes folks, there are rednecks here in the south, but guess what? I’ve found just as many in my travels up north. The only difference I’ve found is the accent. (Sorry about that. My wife is reading over my shoulder and thumbing me in the ribs and told me to mention that. 🙂 ) Actually, most of the folks I’ve met up north have been really great. One funny thing though. When I graduated high school, and before I went in the Navy, I had a job as a telephone market researcher. (We invited folk down to give their opinions on new products for money. Or we conducted research over the phone. When I used a flat mid-western accent I didn’t get near as many opinions completed or confirmed invites as I did when I used my southern accent when I was callung folks in northern areas. I’ve always wondered why.