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will you be a transvesselite one day?

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#1 ·
An Old Salt''s Sea Change

By Darragh Johnson

Ever since he was a boy of 10 and felt the first sharp jerk of wind filling the main, Phil Burgess has sailed.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/11/AR2005071101586.html?referrer=emailarticle
 
#2 ·
Okay, went there. Here''s my summary: aging sailors are moving to powerboats.

The money quotes:
"Forget "the thrill of the wind through the hair," he says. He wants "to go different places and see different things -- faster."

There have always been swabs who, in their fifties, sixties and seventies, abandoned the Xtreme Sport that is sailing for spacious powerboats where "you''re not cranking those winches and hauling up the sails -- all you do is press buttons, and things happen," as transvesselite Neville Williams, 66, who lives in St. Michaels, puts it. But that switch is happening more often now.
Harder to find a better illustration of Baby-boomer Midlife Crisis.

Here''s a quote that gets down to the nerve of the thing:
"It''s not just that older salts are aging out. It''s also that younger boaters are too impatient to join in," says John Peterson, former president of Sail America, the sailboat industry association.

"People today, their most precious commodity is time," he says. "And sailing, if you''re going to use a sailboat to get anywhere, is extremely time-consuming."
Ahem, I''d just like to remind those who are a bit confused about the whole means/end conundrum:
"Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing- absolutely nothing- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." - Water Rat, in The Wind in the Willows
Please, take a young person under your arm, and teach him, before he gets those keys in one hand and that can of beer in the other (the only practical qualifications that I can discern for operating a powerboat). You may be saving him from a horrible fate.
 
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