Category: Dock Party Stories

Posted on

WINE GLASSES, EQUIPMENT, AND PEOPLE FALLING IN THE DRINK

If you’re just tuning in, CLICK HERE to start at the beginning. 🙂

We have heard many Dock 4 Party stories about people falling off the dock…usually in a state of extreme inebriation. While I haven’t seen that myself, there was one funny incident that occurred late one night when we weren’t present.

One of our neighbors, who I’ll call Sam, told the story of hearing something banging on his hull late one night. He went outside and another neighbor, who I’ll call Ian, was in the water, banging on the back of Sam’s boat, and trying to climb onto the swim platform. Yes, he’d fallen in after imbibing a bit too much that night.

Capt. Brian says there are two types of boaters – those who have fallen in and those who haven’t yet. I haven’t yet fallen in (knock on teak) but I’ve come close a few times. Once, I was getting out of the cockpit in a hurry (which is always a mistake) and my body lurched forward. I managed to stop the momentum of my torso by grabbing a life line but my prescription glasses flew off the top of my head, into the drink. They were $400! Brian put on his dive suit and tank, and tried to find them…to no avail. However, while he was diving, our neighbor Allan said he’d recently dropped something and Brian was able to find that for him.

We use plastic wine “glasses” (for obvious reasons) and we’ve lost five of those, sharing the wine remnants with the fish. The arm rests in the cockpit slope slightly outward. That’s so water coming into the cockpit drains out, not in. If you bump a wine glass with your elbow, it shoots off of the armrest and, occasionally, skips across the deck and over the the side. Once at a dock party, I bumped a wine glass I hadn’t even filled with wine yet and it went over. And, I wasn’t even on the boat.

What we need are wine glasses with suction cups on the bottom! I was just sitting here thinking I might be onto something here, and pictured riches flowing in from the patent I would most certainly be applying for very soon. But, alas, I just found a wine glass holder with suction cups for sale online. Darn it.

Click on the glass to check it out!

Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll alert you to new posts and we’ll be having book give-aways! 🙂

NEXT: WHERE WE STAY WHEN “NO TAN LINES” IS ON THE HARD

* * *

Angela Hoy is a publisher, a blogger, and the author of 19 books. She lived on dirt her entire life before her family gave away almost everything they owned, and moved onto a 52-foot Irwin Center Cockpit Ketch. They all live, work, and play on board full-time.

Angela is the publisher of WritersWeekly.com, a free source of paying markets for freelance writers and photographers. If you want to write for magazines, websites, businesses, or others, check it out. It’s free! Her publishing services company, BookLocker.com, has published more than 9,000 books over the past 18 years. If you want to publish a book, she’d love to hear from you! Abuzz Press is BookLocker’s hybrid publishing company. And, PubPreppers.com offers services to authors who are having their books published elsewhere.

Posted on

NAUGHTY NAUTICAL TERMS!

If you’re just tuning in, CLICK HERE to start at the beginning. 🙂

At a recent Dock Party, we were discussing naughty nautical terms. As the night went on, and the cutter cocktails flowed, the terms got even more hilarious!

Back in the day, sailing was strictly for men. In fictional lore, the only women at sea were mermaids, damsels taken captive by pirates or captains (yes, I’m a hard core romance novel addict), and brave women paying passage on vessels…all the while being ogled by the all-male crew.

Pondering the naughty-cal terms below, it’s blatantly obvious that men invented them:

  • Bow thruster
  • Cockpit
  • Seacock
  • Seaman
  • Masthead
  • Spreader
  • Drive shaft
  • Blow me down
  • Thar she blows
  • Broad in the beam (think about it…)
  • A shot across the bow (think about this one, too…)
  • Going on the hard
  • Cuntline (I seriously can’t make this stuff up!!)

Three sheets to the wind doesn’t just mean being drunk.

And, believe it or not, Cat O’Nine Tails also has nautical origins. According to Wikepedia: “The cat o’ nine tails, commonly shortened to the cat, is a type of multi-tailed whip that originated as an implement for severe physical punishment, notably in the Royal Navy and Army of the United Kingdom…”

That concludes our naughty-cal history lesson for today. If you need a cold shower now, I’ll completely understand.

And, if you have other terms to add, please share!

NEXT: SHOULD WE FIRE OUR BOTTOM SCRUBBER?

Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll alert you to new posts and we’ll be having book give-aways! 🙂

* * *

Angela Hoy is a publisher, a blogger, and the author of 19 books. She lived on dirt her entire life before her family gave away almost everything they owned, and moved onto a 52-foot Irwin Center Cockpit Ketch. They all live, work, and play on board full-time.

Angela is the publisher of WritersWeekly.com, a free source of paying markets for freelance writers and photographers. If you want to write for magazines, websites, businesses, or others, check it out. It’s free! Her publishing services company, BookLocker.com, has published more than 9,000 books over the past 18 years. If you want to publish a book, she’d love to hear from you! Abuzz Press is BookLocker’s hybrid publishing company. And, PubPreppers.com offers services to authors who are having their books published elsewhere.

Posted on

HOW DO YOU DECORATE A BOAT FOR HALLOWEEN?

If you’re just tuning in, CLICK HERE to start at the beginning. 🙂

It’s no secret that Halloween is our favorite holiday of the year! Since we moved onto a boat, holiday decorating has become a challenge. We have gone from 3600 square feet (our old house in Maine), to 2400 square feet (in Port Charlotte, FL), to 1800 square feet (in Bradenton, FL), to a 2-bedroom apartment in St. Petersburg, FL (while we shopped for a boat), to a 52-foot Irwin Center Cockpit Ketch.

When we moved to the apartment, and then to the boat, we became minimalists, getting rid of most of our belongings, almost all of which were things we rarely, if ever, used. I wrote more about that HERE.

We previously had seven large containers of Christmas decorations. Now, we have one. We used to have far more Halloween decorations than Christmas ones. Not anymore. We now have one container of Halloween decorations as well. Richard is picking up our Halloween container today so the boys can decorate the boat. The life-sized skeleton will probably end up on near the anchor because that’s closest to the dock. The boys want to buy orange lights to string on the masts and booms, and along the lifelines and stanchions. We have a few other scary goodies that the boys will put outside as well. If you have any cool Halloween boat decorating ideas, please let me know! 🙂

On the Saturday before Halloween, we’ll be attending a murder mystery dinner with a 20’s mobster theme here at the dock. We were all assigned mobster characters except Mason. He will be an actor. We all have to email other specific characters with pre-written statements and questions, which will be fun! We’ve never been to a murder mystery dinner before so we’re pretty intrigued! Richard, who is Gourmet Rick here on the dock, will be doing a lot of the cooking, which he loves.

Richard was going to buy wing-tip shoes for his costume but, in the spirit of minimalism, I told him that’s not a good idea. Why buy a pair of shoes that you’re only going to wear one time? I told him nobody will be looking at his feet. They’ll be looking at his big (plastic) machine gun! Yeah, we’ll only use that one time as well but it was a LOT cheaper than wing-tip shoes! I have fun shopping for my female gangster outfit. I already own a pair of high-heeled boots, and will need to get those out of storage. No need to buy new shoes for me, either!

And, to save money (of course), we’ll be wearing our mystery dinner costumes on Halloween, too, when we attend our daughter and son-in-law’s annual Halloween party.

We are so excited!!! 🙂

NEXT: AMBERJACK RAMPAGE!

* * *

Angela Hoy is a publisher, a blogger, and the author of 19 books. She lived on dirt her entire life before her family gave away almost everything they owned, and moved onto a 52-foot Irwin Center Cockpit Ketch. They all live, work, and play on board full-time.

Angela is the publisher of WritersWeekly.com, a free source of paying markets for freelance writers and photographers. If you want to write for magazines, websites, businesses, or others, check it out. It’s free! Her publishing services company, BookLocker.com, has published more than 9,000 books over the past 18 years. If you want to publish a book, she’d love to hear from you! Abuzz Press is BookLocker’s hybrid publishing company. And, PubPreppers.com offers services to authors who are having their books published elsewhere.