A few days ago there was a post on Scuttleblog entitled Reality TV about a TV casting agency looking for a sailing family to appear on the television show Trading Spouses. The requirements are...
Family that is involved in Yachting and Sailing either as a profession or personal pastime.Now as I understand the premise of shows like this (Wife Swap is a similar program) is that the two wives or two husbands swap families and go live with the other family for a couple of weeks. The odd occasion I happened to have seen such a program (when Tillerwoman happened to have it on as I, of course, would never stoop so low as to actually deliberately watch reality TV shows) the "drama" was always related to the fact that the producers had chosen two families with extremely different life styles. Neatness freaks and slobs. Atheists and religious nuts. Workaholics and family firsters. Sports fanatics and nerds. And so on.
Spouses must be married.
Spouses must have kids over six.
Spouses must have full custody of their kids.
All family members must be citizens of the United States.
The family that makes it on the show wins $50,000.
So it got me thinking. Who are they going to pair the yachtie family with for the spouse swap to achieve maximum dramatic effect? As a sailor what is your worst nightmare of a family to be traded to?
Ideas please in the comments.
17 comments:
Cigarette boat family
NASCAR family
Golfers.
Tillermania, have you seen this:
http://sailingscuttlebutt.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2901#2901
Hmmmm, maybe the producers think of yachties as rich, elitist, frivolous, lah-di-dah upper-class folks and are looking to pair the sailors with a nice family, in a semi-respectable trailer park, who enjoy bowling, square dancing, collecting Precious Moments figurines, attending roller derbies, breeding pit bulls, studying religious tracts, and watching soaps and "reality" shows on the telly all day when not otherwise engaged.
What Pat said, plus also bass fishing. Swap a yacht for a jon-boat, and see the cultures clash. Oh, maybe duck-hunting as well.
I suppose the reality-TV people wouldn't know what to do with a family that has both a 30-foot racing yacht and also a doublewide.
Stinkpot and old gaffer, hard core racery types with coastal potterers that like doors on the head and food from a plate, instead of a freezer bag are a couple that come to mind..
Personal watercraft lovers. Oh how the sparks would fly.
Or else dirtbike racers in Nevada or someplace equally arid.
I'm not a sailor, but I'd reckon a family that got motion sick everytime they got on the water.
What a lot of great ideas. However I do know one excellent sailor who is also a NASCAR fan; and several sailors who like golf. So those are not as strange combinations as you might think.
Some sailors also own powerboats and I hear reports that certain sailing bloggers from the Land of Oz have even been out on jetskis.
I have a feeling that Pat and Carol Anne are playing with our heads. There's some in-joke there that I don't quite get. I know their lake home looks like a trailer but the other things on their list????
Fuff may have the best idea. Going by the rants on various forums and elsewhere about how sailors hate other sailors who enjoy the sport in a different way, I sometimes wonder if we are less tolerant of each other than of folk who don't share our passion.
And Stephen suggest an aquaphobe. Like Tillerwoman you mean? Come to think of it, the TV producers don't need to find another family to pair with the yachtie family. Just come round to our house and film me and my wife. Totally incompatible interests... but happily married for 33 years. Go figure.
oh, easy.
a 50ft powerboater, smoking, meat eaters, GW bush fans, with a 30ft sailing non-smoking vegetarian, liberal family .
what wrong with golf?
"a 50ft powerboater" vs. a "30ft...family". This isn't for Wife Swap, you're talking battle of the giants, a new reality show on FX.
Laser sailing family with a 60' Gunboat catamaran sailing family.
There's nothing wrong with golf, Zen. I'm sure there are some perfectly sane people who have excellent reasons for spending every free summer day knocking a little plastic ball into a tin cup with a stick.
Personally I never took up golf because it seemed to me to be one of those games that like sailboat racing could be seriously addictive and that once hooked I would want to spend more and more time trying to improve my skills - and that would only eat into time available for more important things like sailing.
There were a lot of golfers at work who were always trying to persuade me to join them. I used to tell them I would take up golf when I was too old and fat for Laser sailing. For some reasons, this seemed to offend them. Strange people golfers.
Oh, Pat's just describing some of his relatives in Texas and some of mine in Arkansas. And, yep, Five O'Clock Somewhere is indeed a doublewide, albeit a very nice one that has been mounted on a permanent foundation so both the insurance company and the credit union that holds the mortgage count it as a site-built home. When the Weather Channel shows footage of storm-damaged trailer parks, there are often a couple of trailers still standing intact among the rubble of the others -- those are the ones that got the sort of anchoring we got.
But back to the original topic ... in popular perception, the sailor and the bass fisherman are seen as polar opposites. The bass fisherman is blue-collar, working-class, while the sailor is from the privileged class. The bass fisherman catches his dinner, guts it dockside, and then cooks it up, while the sailor (at least in common perception) is an environmentalist who wouldn't dream of killing another creature in the gruesome way that fish are dispatched. Even if the sailor isn't an environmentalist, gutting fish probably isn't on the agenda.
Meanwhile, if you put a bass fisherwoman on a sailboat, she's likely to get confused at first with all of the lines and the whole concept of sailing. She probably won't conduct herself with perfect decorum around the yacht club. But I bet she'd catch on quickly enough, especially to handling the boat. And what a great benefit to the sailing family if she can not only teach the family to fish but also teach how to make the fish ready to eat.
Growing up in Texas, I heard about one of those veggie-tear-ians (and martians, and aliens, too). Weren't those the folks who ate chicken and fish on Friday or gave up pork ribs for Lent or something lake that?
Actually, I was trying to describe a hypothetical family that would be just about the polar opposite of the general image of a yachting family.
The stuff on the list very much wasn't us -- I haven't been bowling in about 25 years (and I did it because someone else was paying for it), never collected anything other than seashells, haven't had a dog since I was a kid, and can get by just fine without what's broadcast on the telly.
In reality, most of my relatives were into football, light reading, social activities, and various hobbies. Mostly I grew up around powerboats, but even that was an unusual activity in my family -- though I do have a cousin who is an accountant working in a boatyard.
Something that would make us even worse as a "yachtie" family is our involvement with music -- Tadpole plays cello and string bass and Carol Anne used to sing, play classical piano, and play in a recorder ensemble. How many folks have a double-wide trailer with a baby grand?
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