Boat Folks [#10]

While Boat Time is taking some getting used to, adapting to Boat Folks is easy like Sunday morning.  

It is painfully obvious that we are the new kids on the block.

And yet, we seem to be benefitting from an inherent presumption that we belong, that we’re welcome — worthy of helping and hosting and befriending — by simple virtue of the fact that we are here.

We hadn’t been aboard the Ruby Vi two nights before a curious and smiley group arrived, bottle of wine in-hand, ready to hear our story and share theirs. This introduction ignited a series others. To date, seven of our last eight evenings have been spent with new boat friends:

impromptu dinners on the deck, happy hours, and stories shared with some wildly interesting and remarkably generous characters.

They offer to help troubleshoot problems. They offer to go sailing. They loan us tools. They even offer to scrub decks.

John and I marvel at this phenomenon,

likening it to being new to Park City seven years ago — the kindness and warmth of strangers who fast became family seemed a phenomenon impossible to replicate.

Boat Folks have given us pause to consider the faults in our assumption.

A strikingly similar eagerness to share time and resources exists in the people we’ve met here on the docks.

Like Park City, this is a tight-knit community where individuals from all different starting points have manifested their chosen paths — deciding unapologetically how and where they want to live.

It’s an eclectic crowd.

There’s a former pro-rugby player (who also happens to be a super-yacht captain), a military man, a forensic scientist, a yacht brokerage owner, a software engineer, and a young retiree to name a handful.

The boat community knows no city limits, no country borders.

Those we’ve met are a world-traveling-island-chasing-continent-hopping group of free-spirited sailors.

Their upcoming list of calendared items is an excerpt straight out of a Bucket List book: sailing the Chesapeake all summer, heading to South Africa in October, a yacht delivery here and there, returning to the Bahamas in November, and…, and…, and… It’s inspiring to say the least.

There’s no doubt we miss our people.

We survive on texts, an occasional FaceTime-fest, and the promise that they’ll visit us or we’ll visit them — that the two worlds we’re straddling will eventually meet in the middle.

While we eagerly await that day, we’re in good hands with our Boat Folks — soaking up the assistance and friendships they continue to graciously provide.

Hopefully someday, somewhere along our journey, we’ll become someone’s Boat Folks and can pay forward this invaluable gift.