Why should I pay for my own cruises?

June, 2002

By Tom Snyder

I am planning to sail to New York City from Portland in June and I want someone else to pay for it. I’ll bet this strategy has occurred to everyone at one time or another. When I was 16, my best friend and I were hoping to persuade National Geographic to pay us to drive across the country over a summer. Why would they pay us? Because we would take photographs of hydroelectric plants or interview old people or test car seats. Something.

In the end, we didn’t get paid for traveling across the country, partly because even we knew our suggestions were without merit, so we never even tried. We also never did the drive. I worked at a valve factory and my friend worked on a car ferry.

But, at 52, I am back at it. Of course it is too late now to line up a benefactor who will cover all of my cruising costs for my June cruise, but I can work on the problem from the other end. By which I mean I will decide now on some value-added activity that I will do throughout my cruise, and then, after the fact, I will find someone who wants to pay me back. How brilliant is this? Cruise paid for!

I have come up with several possible projects that will make some magazine’s mouth water, metaphorically speaking. Let me describe them.

1. This is my favorite. I will write modern sea chanteys that are loosely based on the essential spirit of every port I will visit. For example, in Biddeford Pool, I might write a song about a pool. I am guessing that this song would be charming without being cloying, and the chorus would rely on words that rhyme with Biddeford.

Or, as another example, in Scituate, a port about which I currently know very little, I would write a song about, and I am guessing here, their tireless struggle to get new launches or maybe about

how the level of sodium is up in their harbor water. (Again, I am guessing.) The songs would all be designed to be sung by a group with mens’ and ladies’ parts clearly spelled out.

2. This is also my favorite. I will take photographs of the transom of every single boat I come across with a clever name. I will then present them in the form of a photo essay. Who is going to say no to that? I know a lot of people think that all of the clever boat names have been used up, but the purpose of this project would be to show that boat owners of the eastern seaboard are very funny and clever.

I once saw a boat named My Bonus and I almost died laughing, because, if you think about it, what it implies is that the owner of the boat was able to buy the boat because of a bonus he received at work. See what he did? Another one was a boat named Stock Options. This works because it leads one to guess that after receiving generous stock options, potentially in the Internet area, this person went right out and bought a boat. Funny stuff!

3. This one is actually probably at the top of my list. I will explore the nightlife in every place I visit. Then I will write up a splashy description of the way the young beautiful people of that area spend their evenings. I would probably include time-lapse photos of headlights streaming into the town. (You see a lot of this whenever National Geographic covers any city in Australia.)

For example, on the Isles of Shoals I would describe… In fact Isles of Shoals might be a bad example in terms of a high-rolling attitude toward leisure time – unless a religious group is putting on one of their hospitality nights, but I can’t count on that. A better example might be how I would cover the York River. It goes without saying that York must have nightclubs, plazas and such. I would be particularly well suited for this project, because I can blend in very easily around glamorous people. There’s just something about me that screams, “I know what to do in a plaza!” I would describe the mixed drinks du jour and who was sleeping with whom. That sort of thing.

4. Finally, and this is my absolute favorite, I could hang an advertisement over my topsides, port and starboard. For example, I could make a banner that says “Oral B Electric Toothbrush”. The advantage of hull advertising over conventional bus or taxi advertising is that the slower speeds of a boat allow people to absorb more complex messages. You can’t read information about a toothbrush’s unique reciprocal scrubbing action when you are moving at 60 miles per hour. Anyway, once I returned home from my cruise I would notify the Oral B folks and they would probably send me money.

I guess the point I am trying to make in this column is that there is no reason for any of us to pay for our own cruising. We provide valuable services to the world when we sail up and down the coast and we might as well get paid for it.

Damn it, we’re worth it.

Tom Snyder sails out of Peaks Island, Maine.