Jay Honeck wrote:

We've got friends who own a 40+ foot yacht on Lake Michigan. It cost over
$300K to acquire, and an amazing amount of money to maintain. (Each year
they have to pay to have it removed with a crane, and then shrink wrapped --
I'm not kidding -- for winter storage.) Worse, it is a depreciating asset,
meaning that it is worth less and less every year. It has two 350-cubic
inch Chevy engines, gets 6 gallons to the mile, and they never, ever leave
the dock.

I have a friend that has a 42 footer. He keeps it at Liberty Park marina, across
from Manhattan. He lives on it during the summer. Cost him $45,000 (used, like
most of our aircraft). He occasionally cruises as far as Albany for a vacation,
but its main use is a family summer home. His gas costs about what ours costs
us. His expenses are trivial compared to a hangar, maintenance, and inspection
fees for something like a Warrior. Sure, that family could probably afford to
fly. If he sold the boat. For the dubious privelege of shoehorning his family
into an aluminum sardine can, he could wear uncomfortable hearing protection for
hours while risking losing his job due to weather delays and spending three
times what airline tickets would cost to get him to the same place. That's
always assuming his wife wouldn't divorce him first.

In addition to knowing Tom, I do a fair amount of work for the Navasink Marina.
The social life at an airport can't compare to what the boat owners there enjoy.
For much less than the cost of keeping a typical 4-seat aircraft. Your friends
may not ever leave the dock, but all of the Navasink tenants do fairly
frequently. The Sea Bright drawbridge is up about 20% of the time I need to
cross it during summer, and it only opens for something about 2 stories tall.

Sure, most of them go into shrink wrap in December and don't come out until
early April, but when I was faced with digging the Maule out of the snow,
preheating for half an hour, and then freezing my cojones off to "warm up the
oil," I frequently wished we could do the same thing with our aircraft.

Yet, they look at Mary and me flying all over the country as an unaffordable
extravagance, even though they know that what we spend is a tiny fraction of
what they spend on boating.

You spend a tremendous sum of money to do something they would pay to avoid
doing (and do).

And these guys never play a single round.

*That's* your definition of a "serious golfer?" You are *really* divorced from
reality.

George Patterson
Give a person a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a person to
use the Internet and he won't bother you for weeks.