I always dreamed of cruising south one day, only I assumed it would be in a sailboat. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against either. I've owned both sailboats and powerboats in my 40 years of boating, my powerboats being a 16' runabout and a 28' cruiser, my sailboats being a Rhodes 19, a Spirit 21, a Pearson 26, and a Hallberg Mistral 33. I swing both ways. I'm bi-boatal.

I think that sailors don't understand powerboats. They'll be going along at six knots and get angry when waked by an overtaking powerboat. They don't understand the concept of the slow pass. If they slowed down to a couple of knots, the powerboat could slow down to four or five knots and pass at a slow wake speed.

I think that powerboaters don't understand sailboats. They don't understand that sailboats can't sail directly upwind and sometimes downwind and often have to tack or gybe down a channel. One powerboater friend would get very anxious when there were too many sailboats "jibber gybing all over the place".

There are differences in how the two types of boats are used, of course. Sailboats are comparitively slow and so will often my long offshore passages to make time, where a fast powerboat will stay inside where the waves are smaller and they can go faster. And then you have trawlers, which move at sailboat speeds.

It's my experience that sailors and powerboaters are all pretty much the same, but there's a difference in class. There are low budget sailors and trawler trash like me, and then there's the yachty gold plater set, and for the most part, rarely do the two intersect. And then, of course, you have the liveaboard folks, and they don't care what kind of boat you have since we're all nuts anyhow.

So that's my take on it, but take it with a grain of salt. I don't really give a big rat's ass what anyone thinks about me or my boat so I'm pretty insensitive to it all.