Boat Life: 10 Ridiculous Tourist Questions
Living on a tropical island and working on a sailboat for a living can seem like a fairytale to most people. Visiting exotic beaches, uninhabited islands and pristine snorkel spots everyday might sound more like a vacation than a vocation. To our guests, our lifestyle can be confusing, hard to comprehend or hard to accept; “So you’re telling me this is your job?!”
Some people who come out with us have never stepped foot on a boat before. The questions they ask may seem obvious, but genuine questions about an activity you’ve never attempted before are perfectly acceptable. The place where we start to lose people is when common sense goes out the window or when the questions are laced with a mean spirit.
Both occur frequently, sometimes simultaneously. I have compiled a short list of some of the all time most inexplicable tourist questions that I have received to date. Many of these prove that there actually IS such a thing as a bad question.
Working full time on a boat must be an act of love for the vocation – I can’t imagine facing daily challenges from the weather to the boat problems to the customer problems – In my youth, I thought about it – now I’m 68 and I’m happy to sell boating rope and live in a small home and sometimes sail a small boat