BY DAVID LEVESQUE – EDITOR OF LATITUDES & ATTITUDESÂ
Ask five cruisers to define cruising and you’ll probably get at least seven answers.
One will say it’s freedom. Another will say adventure. Someone else will tell you it’s about self-reliance, seeing the world, living simply, or finally escaping a calendar that has been controlling their life for far too long.
Then someone at the end of the bar will tell you cruising is mostly fixing things in beautiful places.
They are all correct.
Spend an afternoon at a marina, a dinghy dock, a boat show, a beach bar, or one of our Latitudes & Attitudes Cruiser Parties. Look around. You might find a teacher sitting beside a tradesman, a surgeon talking with a songwriter, a retired couple swapping stories with a family raising children aboard, and a lifelong sailor sharing a drink with someone who learned the difference between port and starboard just this morning.Â
Some arrived on monohulls. Others came on catamarans, trawlers, powerboats, charter boats, pocket cruisers, or boats held together by equal parts epoxy, optimism, and a dependable bilge pump.
On land, many of these people might never have met. On the water, they compare weather windows by lunch and pass tools back and forth by dinner.
That may be the greatest trick of the cruising lifestyle: it turns biography into background and shared experience into common ground.
