[discuss] Re: BearerBoat '03???

[R. A. Hettinga]

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At 1:39 AM -0500 on 12/10/02, an erstwhile mendicant scholar wrote:


> What's the status on this?
> I'm starting to build FC plans. I realized a bit ago that if I'm
> going to spend an extra thousand, I should spend it flying my
> girlfriend down too. But I still want to "just talk" about how the
> boat thing might work. :)

Frankly, one would think it was out of your league completely,
money-wise, mon ami, but, hey, what the hell... :-).

It's pretty simple, really. Take a look at the cabin layouts in the
original message. There are four cabins on the boat. Each sleeps two
people. We'll fill them up first-come, first-serve. Two have their
own showers/heads inside the cabin, "en-suite", two have shower/heads
just outside the door so that others can use them, i.e., visitors to
the boat, and the crew and the captain, who sleep in two one-person
berths, accessible trough hatches in the bows of each hull. (I love
the French, don't you? :-)) In a pinch, there are three or four extra
berths scattered about the main cabin, the table probably folds out
for two, and so on, but I want to fill the cabins first, and then we
can decide together whether to bring more people on after that, or to
organize another boat for them instead.

So, if I can fill the four cabins with four couples at $1500 per
person, we have enough people to charter a boat with, pay the
skipper, eat and party like, well, french Caribbean catamaran
charterers on holiday :-), and have a van to fart around the island
with (meaning, among other things, we can sleep in various harbors
and drive to the conference from there, if we didn't want to just
stay in the same harbor the conference is located in and day-sail
from there in the afternoons). We can tone it down from there, but,
frankly, we're looking at, what, $8k or so, including skipper,
skipper's tip, various forms of island vigorish, etc., but *not*
including food (but we still have to feed the skipper, right? :-),
van, maybe not a dingy, etc. so, again frankly, we're not too far
from the the nut at $1500 per person all up, including, maybe, water
toys besides a dingy, like snorkel-stuff/boardsailer(s)/whatever.

When we did this last in Anguilla, I ended up on the hook for $3k or
so in fun and games, including the van, extra extra fuel and
groceries, electrical toys, painting Sandy Ground with 802.11b :-),
and, of course, the obligatory BearerBoat silk-screened polo shirt
:-).

[Which, frankly, was worth it. :-). We went out almost every
afternoon after the conference session was over, usually with 10 or
15 guests on board (including the three or four geeks staring at a
PBG3 marvelling that we could hit Slashdot from Prickly Pear Key via
802.11b :-)), lots of hanging out and talking crypto, using the
blender to burn out various inverters before we figured out we had to
clamp them directly to the battery bank, snorkelling, marvelling at
the sheer volume of water Hettinga could displace with a cannonball
:-), etc...]

I expect, but don't know, that Anguilla is waay cheaper than
Guade-freakin-loupe, for general cost of living. Certainly the boats
cost a bit more to charter there, but, like I said last time they're
*nice* boats. Did I tell you it was worth it? :-).



Finally, the other, most important condition for this, besides the
pecuniary one, is that you *don't* get seasick, (the use of dramamine
or scopalomine is fine; I do), and a good proxy for proof of
seasicklessness is some (happy!) experience sailing, or, better, an
actual sailing resume we can stick onto the charter application with
all the rest of us. Last time four of the 8 people on the boat, and
one of the regular visitors (who's an actual West-Scotland charter
captain :-)), had experience either chartering, cruising, or racing
sailboats, though, given the, um, barginess of the Wauquez we got in
Anguilla, there wasn't much call for it. Fontaine Pajots we're
getting are a little less, um, bargy, so we can expect to actually
sail through our tacks instead of motoring through them.


Anyway, the famous quote from J. Pierpont Morgan about the cost of
yachts notwithstanding, and the bubble being *not* at all friendly to
most of us, and all, yes, Virginia, there are more *sensible* things
to do with your cash than this, but, hey, it would be very *fun* to
do this, oui?


BTW, I got exactly *one* flame for the last message, which was
remarkable in itself :-), but, no, I'm *not* affiliated with SunSail
or anything. I'm doing this because it was an absolute ball the first
time I organized such a thing for FC2K -- even the giant Gold Coast
monster-cat we bought a bunch of sunset-cruise tickets for at FC01
was way cool -- and it would be great fun to do the boat thing again,
particularly as the conference is on one of the very best
yacht-harbors in Mrs. Slocumb's "Carribeano". Heck, the reason I set
up AM-only sessions at FCXX is *exactly* so we can do stuff like
*this* in the afternoon -- let our hair down, talk *lots* of shop,
and so on, including play boats. That and, not like a few FCs of
yore, maybe do a deal or two :-). It is *financial* cryptography,
after all, yes?


So. If you're still interested, Mendicant Scholar, and I hope you
are, get back to me, or, better, do that and also send me a check in
the amount of $1500 :-), payable to "SunSail", and another for your
girlfriend if she's coming :-), and, if -- no, when -- we get enough
checks rounded up, I'll ping you to make it good, send them all off
to SunSail, and we'll charter ourselves a cat.

At the moment, I've got one, maybe two cabins spoken for in the first
boat, and we need four total to pull the trigger on this thing.

And, I think we'll do it, too. Now that people are starting to
seriously think about doing FC03, I feel that itch starting to
happen. It's kind of the itch I got when I had the idea for FC97 in
the first place, shovelling snow in Boston in the winter of 1996, or
maybe even the itch about parking the eclipse over the top of that
Montserrat ash-cloud. This one's a little smaller in scale,
admittedly; times are, well, hard, :-), but it's the same itch, I
think. I think it means that the rubble's stopped bouncing, if so,
life, again, folks, does not suck.

Kewl.

Here's hoping to see you in Guadeloupe!

Cheers,
RAH

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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'