… [all said already in the Sailing thread]
Adriatic
Even in Adriatic, where everything looks ideal, the majority of sailing fleet (worth literally billions) is most of the time either tied in marinas of pulled out on shore. Some 5.000 sailboats and motorboats (worth between €300k and €2M each) are in the charter fleets owned by Croatian companies and who knows how many privately owned under different flags being permanently located in Adriatic. It’s estimated that Croatian marinas have capacity of more than 16000 sea berths and more than 8500 land berths.
A few years back a friend of mine invited me to go sailing with him and some friends. They were renting a boat at Sausalito, a big sailing place north of San Francsico on the bay. It took about an hour to get everything sorted on the boat, way longer than a pre-flight. Then off we set. There wasn’t much wind. It took us the whole day to get to the Bay Bridge and back – about three miles each way. At one point we were totally becalmed and had to wait for half an hour to get moving again.
As we crossed the centre line of the Golden Gate bridge there was a speck on the horizon approaching from the sea. In the 20 minutes or so that it took us to cross the span of of the bridge it had turned into a giant container ship that passed frighteningly close to us.
As a one-off it was enjoyable, but it did cross my mind several times that I could have flown to Seattle or Denver and back in the same time. Plus which, by its nature, sailing is wet and windy, which means cold unless you do it in the tropics.
Intellectually, sailing is 1% as interesting as flying, surely 
Hence I simply do not understand people who get as far as an IR and going places seriously and then they get out of it and buy a boat. Especially in N Europe where sailing is basically misery, interspersed with repairing and replacing all the bits which have corroded. I live not so far from Brighton Marina and walking around I see this all the time. The 1M+ boats are just rotting and nobody is really having fun. Every few months they take the family and another family for a trip to the Channel Islands which costs £10,000 in fuel and takes 10hrs… In the Greek islands and the Adriatic, sure, and I would have a fast powerboat if I lived there.
A lot of people who made the move lost their medical, but most of these are cardiac issues which are not only almost all entirely fixable but getting them fixed will not only dramatically improve your quality of life but also enable you to keep flying.
The rest is keeping flying interesting. Examples Examples It is a challenge but that’s true for any hobby.
loco wrote:
Up to jet and it’s done—time to look for a boat.
Living in Poland and having boat there doesn’t sound as much fun. Living in Poland and having boat elsewhere probably means not much sailing or a lot of travelling for sailing. Living somewhere else with nice climate and having boat there sounds like retirement.
Up to jet and it’s done—time to look for a boat
Work on the social side of flying. A boat won’t help with that – especially if you are not single
In fact with a boat you will be going nowhere, and doing so very slowly
28 hours. As far as I can see, my worse year ever.
Mostly because other things in life need to be prioritized.
79:08 in 50 flights. Down from 399:37 in 2022. The first half of the year was unfreezing ATPL, hiring FO and flying a little in the back. After the summer holidays, I sold both planes. No flying since the end of August. Seems I’m following the path Peter described many times in this forum. Up to jet and it’s done—time to look for a boat. At present I have no flying aspirations for 2023.
2022 was a bad year – just 17:50 including 02:05 night – hoping for better in ’23
