Brides, Babies, and Boats

This is a good time to let you know that I’m a bit obsessive compulsive when it comes to theories. I have to have a theory about everything, no matter how absurd. Perhaps it’s my way of trying to make sense of the world, perhaps I’m a little crazy. It literally keeps me up at night at times, so I’m leaning towards the latter.

One theory that I have noodled over the years is the “Contest of the three Bs”. The gist is that I propose that the similarities between getting married (Brides), having a Baby, and living on a Boat are so spot on that they are nothing less than a cosmic joke. There are cruel celestial children up on high playing with our lives in a game called “Watch this, I bet I can make them do it again”. I’ll explain the game and the rules, just in case you want to get some ants and give it a try. But, before I get into describing the game itself, I want to chat about how I first noticed the crossover between the three Bs.

For years I’ve chuckled at the phenomenon where you can take any ordinary object, put either the word “wedding” or “infant” in the title, and easily double the price you can sell it for. I had also heard about the infamous “B.O.A.T. buck” (Break Out Another Thousand) that jokes (is it really a joke) that any item for sale with the word “marine” in it is going to cost at least a thousand dollars.

I’ve pondered infinite possibilities as to why the three Bs are so expensive. Mayhaps it’s liability? There IS an extra safety aspect that has to go into products designed for boats and babies…but what about brides? There is usually little danger in a wedding, so that theory is bunk. It it urgency? Babies and brides do have a definitive timeline. You have to be ready for that kiss/scream (I’ll let you decide which is which) by a given date, so you just go out and buy whatever “they” tell you too at a premium. But boats have nothing but time. Sigh. Understanding the world is hard.

Fear not! After three months living on a boat, I feel qualified now to have all the answers. I’ve figured it out. It is simply pure unadulterated hysteria. You’ve spent so long fantasizing about one of the Bs, that once it’s in your grasp, you want to spare no expense to make it perfect. The more expensive product has to be better, and better is better…so buy it!

So, there you have it. You’re welcome. Ground rule number 1 to the game is: Everything costs more. Not only that, but it depreciates fast. After the wedding, the pictures are the only thing that you can even hold in your hand. Babies outgrow and break everything. And boats rust. A lot. You clean it up thinking that you’ve done a solid job, only for it to come back the next day. And boat parts break. I literally installed three different water pumps in the span of two weeks last month.

Now, on to the actual game. There are three quarters, each with two halves. That alone should let you know that this could get a little weird. These quarters are Fantasy, Delusion, and Reality

Also, there aren’t really rules (except for the money one, that’s set in stone). If you’ve every played the game Fluxx, it’s a bit like that. You don’t every know how to win until somebody has done it.

Fantasy

In the Fantasy quarter, the rules start to emerge and players opt in. It’s all about building up an elaborate set of expectations in your head that you will try to match later in the game. For a wedding, it could start as early as playing bride/groom as a kid. “I’m going to marry a prince at a country club on an island and Jack Johnson is going to give me away”. For the baby, it is often the victors of a round of Bride thinking about how serene and lovely it would be to have a cute little tot running around.

Note: this half can be skipped in a lightening round of “Baby” and replaced instead by a wild night out with the boys/girls.

For a boat, it can be any sort of crazy bug up your butt. For me, it started about thirty years ago when I first heard Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville”. I was hooked with the idea of “palm trees and coconuts”, and immediately proceeded to watch Cocktail 400 times and spray coconut oil around my dorm room (true story). I bought every magazine and book I could find about the island life (I lived in Colorado, so needed to be an armchair Island Boy), and stumbled on the concept of living on a boat in the book “The Cruising Life“. I couldn’t believe that there were people actually buying and living on sail boats, without needing to win the lottery. I was further hooked, and spent the next three decades planning how to make my escape.

After sussing out the fantasy…err, I mean rules, you pick teams in the second half of the first quarter. You date to find your mate. You mate to get your baby. You save to get your ship. If you’re lucky, your new teammates will all show each other their cards (fantasy) to make sure you’re all playing by the same rules. However, many people naively skip this step and just assume it’s all good and keep their cards pretty close to their chest.

Team picking in my game of Boat started right after college for me (early 2000’s). It was simple: I decided that I was going to play a solo round and set off on my own. My first thought on getting my first job in software was “I just need to do this for about five years, save all my money, and then I can get my boat and sail away”. As you can imagine…it didn’t quite work out that way. Life had some ups and downs (financially and socially). I bought my first rental property knowing that the income from it would help with boat life. There were supposed to be many more, but several recessions kept it at just the one for awhile.

A few years into my plans, I paused my game of Boats to play a match of “Brides” with a beautiful woman from Iowa named Meredith. After that, the Boat game started to actually take shape. When we first started dating, I opened up and showed her my cards.

It went something like this:

Greg: Hey, you're pretty neat. This could really turn into something. Before we get serious, I need you to know a couple of things about me. First, if we have kids, the first son needs to be named Greg. It's just a thing. Second, I plan on buying a boat, moving aboard, and sailing off into the sunset. If you're cool with that, I'd love to buy you a blue margarita.

Meredith: Jeepers Greg, I think you're just swell, and both of those things sound great to me! Oh, and I want fifty kids.

Greg: k!

Note: There’s an element of fantasy to the team picking half too 🙂

Luckily she was serious about agreeing to both of my conditions. We named our first son Greg (but call him Hunter) and we started learning to sail and continue to buy rental properties to finance the boat life. We negotiated on her one condition and decided on three kids instead of fifty.

Delusion

Once the rules are set and teams are picked, active play begins. In the first half of this quarter is the long fantasized event itself. The bride walks down the aisle (or in our case, jumps off the boathouse), the baby is born and gets a smack on the butt, and the would be boat owner signs the paper work. If your team worked together, you can get through this round with a bunch of points. If you hid your cards, it can get messy.

Country club or elope? Ten kids or two? City or Suburbs? Roses or Calla lilies? Gerber daisies!

For our boat, we expanded on my dream of buying a cheap sailboat and fixing it up as we went. Because we played Babies three times and now had a family of five that was going to go with us, we decided on a catamaran. Budget was still a consideration, so we looked for an older model. We had a false start with a Lagoon 450, and eventually found a a 15 yr old Leopard 46 that was in good shape down in Panama. We closed quickly, and became boat owners in October of 2022.

After “the event”, you advance to “the honeymoon”. For Brides, this is quite literally a honeymoon. For Babies, it’s that time where your little cherub can do no wrong. She is certainly the cutest baby that’s ever been born, and I don’t mind at all getting up at 2 am to feed her and change her butt!

For our game of Boat, the first five months were spent with the boat in Panama (and then Florida) and us in Colorado. We freely spent money (we were both still working) on all the goodies that we just knew we needed. New radar, rigging, wind instruments, life raft, etc, etc. We had a countdown on the wall of our house, and watched Sailing Zatara and Sailing with Six regularly. I sold all my homebrew gear on ebay and set aside the money to buy a kite surfer. I took diesel classes and bought tools that I’d never heard of (what’s a fid?). We had all the answers, had a completely romanticized view of boat life, and exited this round with about a billion (imaginary) points. I had a severe case of RBF (Resting Boat Face).

Here’s a quote from this round to hold on to for later:

Meredith: Greg, what are you most excited for living on a boat?

Greg: Fixing stuff!

idiot.

Reality

Forget everything you thought you knew.

The first step in the Reality quarter is to take all of your rule cards and put them in a neat little pile. Both of you. Go on, you can do it. Good.

Now light the cards on fire.

Oh, and put your points back at zero.

Now we really start playing the game, and things can get tough for awhile. Before you get too worried, I want you to know that this too shall pass. Things get better. I promise. Or they don’t….but that’s up to you (as Bob Bitchin says: “the difference between an adventure and an ordeal is attitude”). It turns out that your new spouse likes soft beds, and you like them stiff. You like to spend, they like to save. The baby is still cute, but now you realize it’s also colicky and has a milk allergy.

The Boat. Oh, the boat. I wish it just had colic. But…no. It has water problems, electrical problems, engine problems, smell problems. The first couple months were pretty stressful. Like a game of whack-a-mole, every time I fixed one thing two more things popped up. The weather kept surprising us, and we found ourselves in squalls. The kids were homesick and there were bugs eating us alive. I replaced batteries, gauges, water makers, and water pumps. I had a “things to fix on the boat” list that grew every day. We drug anchor and called the Coast Guard. We spent way more time in marinas waiting out storms than we planned. We renamed the weather app we use from “Predict Wind” to “Pretend Wind” after Greyson one day pointed out that it wasn’t called “Actual Wind”.

You will exit this half with negative points, but you will get through it.

In the next half, things start to settle. You learn to compromise in your marriage, and realize that some of your spouse’s ideas are pretty great. Your baby starts to laugh, walk, and talk. The points start to add up and it starts to get worth it.

On the Boat, we’re entering this phase. Things are still breaking pretty regularly, but we’re learning to take it in stride. The weather is more unpredictable than ever, but we’re learning to get wet and have contingencies. The kids are meeting more and more kid boats and making new friends (we just dropped anchor at Green Turtle Cay, and a family came right over in their dinghy). We’ve started using the sails more and the engines less.

This half, and the game, ends when you realize that the points don’t actually matter. You have learned that life with your spouse is better than life without, and everything else doesn’t matter. Your kids start teaching you about life, and you can’t help but smile. Your boat becomes a vessel for an adventure and part of your family. You want to make her pretty and keep her safe, and she wants to carry you to ports unknown.

Cruising

When the game is over, you live your life together with your Bride, Baby, or Boat and weather the storms (sometimes literally) as a true team. In Boats, that’s called “cruising”. It’s a world where your job is taking care of your boat (at least 40 hrs a week) and your nights and weekends are spent in exotic and beautiful ports of call. We’ve been cruising the Bahamas now for a couple of months, and have lived the post card life. The kiddos finished their homeschool yesterday, and are now on a version of “summer break”. For that, we’re heading over to the east coast to explore a part of the USA that is new to us and get out of the dreaded “hurricane box” before those storms start.

I don’t know where this life is going to lead us, or for how long we will be out here. For now, I’m learning to be ok with not knowing, and am trying to chill out on my theories. I spend moments just staring at palm trees, and knowing that the boat will break, and we will fix it. The kids will fight, and then they will hug. We’ll be caught in a squall, and it will pass. The sun will set, but it will rise up again tomorrow.