camaraderie: Thanks for your kindly advice.
SEMIJim: Thank you but you're a bit late, another poster kindly helped me find the New Thread icon. (It was not prominent.)
And as to your remark, 'simply including the words "cruising," "liquid" and "sail" in a post doesn't magically make the subject on-topic for a sub-forum that clearly states "sailing related"', are you joking?
The subject of financing one's cruising is dealt with in chapters and whole books by such noted sailing writers as the Pardeys, the Dashews, Don Street, Annie Hill and even Claire Allcard. It is the specifics that are too individualized to put in a book and that is why I'm asking for real-time advice.
So instead of using your cruising knowledge to help me reach my cruising goal by answering my question, you chose to nit-pick and get snarky over whether my question was "sailing-related". Okay, so you're a moderator here (right?) and you are making the decisions that a moderator makes. And my question is not pertinent to General Interest. So are you telling me now that these questions are not appropriate for the Sailnet site? If they're not, why not? If they are, where would you like me to post them?
sailingdog: The format changed long before you became a member; the pages are more cluttered now, less intuitive for an old guy like me and it's harder to use this site. And I have 20/25 and 20/30 vision without glasses on a bad day.
It is just this pompousness that turns me off to this site. And I don't think the agrument that it takes longer to read the posts holds (forgive me for being unnautical) water:
my little posts don't seem to have slowed down sailing dog who finds tme to write, in a less than 2 years, over sixteen thousand posts at a rate of over 25 per day; most of which contain the same drivel as his last posts: even I know that there are no "perhaps slightly different" self-steerers within a brand and they don't differentiate between specific hull forms. They go, essentially, by boat tonnage and length. I just wanted to know from personal experience which brands were better. But I sure don't want to slow you down, sailingdog.
Sheesh. I went a year without using this board; I can go another ten.