Do you like being on the ocean? If so what is the smallest boat you will consider for ocean sailing?
As a hobby, pastime, or sport, I have never been aboard an actual sailing vessel. I was aboard many US Navy ships during my active duty years in the Marines. Even though not technically accurate, we referred to our shipboard overseas deployments as “sailing”, it’s a nautical term leftover from the days of sail. We also referred to it as “steaming”, and as being “on float”.
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P.S. I absolutely loved being aboard ship and being out to sea. I enjoyed it more than some sailors did, which is kind of rare for a Marine. Granted, back then, Marines boarded the Navy ships for a six-month deployment, and very few of our daily duties had anything to do with maintaining or sailing the ship, that’s the Navy’s job. The sailors, however, were stationed aboard the ship full time, not just those six months. Their lives aboard ship was vastly different than a Marine’s life aboard ship, but the trade-off came during amphibious operations when we Marines would “hit the beach”, or on military parlance, attack. Being peacetime and in a training status, our amphibious landings put about 5,000 Marines ashore from four or five or six ships, which we‘d accomplish in numerous types of landing crafts as in the above photos, or helicopters flown from the flight deck of the ships, or smaller ships that moved into the beach and opened up right there, expelling their Marines. Once ashore, we‘d live in the field for however long the exercise lasted, anywhere from a couple of days to a month, living on land. All the creature comforts of shipboard life were left behind (hot meals, showers, real toilets, etc,).
Of course, I loved every minute of it, and I truly miss those days of my youth.
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I was only good at panic-swimming. It’s a technique that I perfected myself.
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Hey, wait . . . that last line either explains a lot, or it’s a crying shame.
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