This week I received an e-mail from a gentleman who said he was with the Center for Seabees and Facilities Engineering, and that they wanted to request our permission for the Department of the Navy to use one of our copyrighted articles. Specifically, he wanted to reprint the article Tom wrote for Tropical Boating on Anchoring in 4 Easy Steps in a training handbook for Navy sailors undergoing training to operate small Navy boats. They requested, as part of the permission, the wording of the credit line we would want to be included with it.

Of course, my first reaction was that this is some kind of scam or spam. But I checked the e-mail headers, and the email originated from a navy.mil server. Then I checked the originating IP address, and it’s registered to the Department of the Navy. And a quick Google search revealed that the Seabees do have a facilities center in the California city that was in the sender’s sig line.

I gave the permission, after checking with Tom to make sure he had no objection. The intended use seems to be for a printed handbook, but I’m kind of hoping that they re-publish it online somewhere. Tom initially said “no online use” — his concern was that if the Navy published it, people would think we stole the article from the Navy. But I made it a condition of our permission that any online use would not only include the credit line, but that the credit line would include a link to Tropical Boating.

Whether they’ll ever use it online or not, I have no idea. But if they do, we’ll get a .mil inbound link to Tropical Boating. And Tom can truthfully say that the Navy is using him as a resource for training its sailors.

Every year at this time of year, I’m reminded of how much I hate the switch back to “standard time.” That might make sense in the rest of the country, but I live in Florida, and things are different here.

I’ve always thought that we here in Florida should be on a Daylight Saving Time/Standard Time schedule exactly the opposite of the rest of the country. We should have DST during the winter months, and ST during the summer.

All summer, the hot sun is blazing away until late into the evening, causing us to hide indoors and run our air conditioners. If we were on Standard Time during those hot months, it would cool off — at least tiny bit — an hour earlier in the evening, and we might have some time in the late afternoon when it would be pleasant to be outdoors.

All winter, when we have wonderful weather and want to be out of doors as much as possible, the sun sets early and it’s full dark by 6pm. Most people have little or no daylight time after work to spend outdoors. It gets dark too early.

My husband and I went sailing in our kayaks yesterday. We hauled the kayaks down to Pine Island Marina and sailed fro there out to our friend’s fish shack, one of those old-timey fishing huts on pilings out in Pine Island Sound. It was a beautiful day — sunny, but not too hot, and just a delight to be outside, especially on the water. That’s the kind of weather we have from October through March. But with a 2 1/2 hour sail from the fish shack back to the marina, we had to leave by 3:30 to make sure we got back before dark. Since going back to standard time last night, we’ll have to leave by 2:30 for that same trip.

When told the reason for Daylight Saving time, the old Indian said “Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of the blanket and have a longer blanket.”

My husband works for a yacht brokerage in Punta Gorda. He gets at least one call or visit every week from someone who wants to sell a boat that’s simply too low-cost for the brokerage to list it. The brokerage, like most yacht brokerages, charges a commission based on a percentage of the boat’s sale price, but does have a minimum commission of $2,000. For someone with a $5,000 or $10,000 boat to sell, that’s just too high a fee to list their boat with a brokerage. My husband is just one salesman at one brokerage in a small Florida city — out of many thousands of boat salesmen at many hundreds of yacht brokerages throughout Florida. There must be hundreds, even thousands, of boat owners who need to sell their boat, but their boat isn’t worth enough to list with a used boat dealer.

The thing is, my husband hates the interactions he has with these boat owners. Don’t misunderstand — he likes the boat owners themselves. But he hates having to tell them that the brokerage can’t list their boat, and then sending them away without being able to suggest any sort of reasonable solution for them.

These boat owners often have no good alternative for marketing their boat. They can list it with one of the big national online boat sale sites — but by the time they’ve paid for 6 months of listing fees, extra charges for photos, extra charges to highlight their listings, and extra charges for this, that, and the other, they’re likely to spend just as much as if they had listed their boat with a yacht brokerage.

Or they can take out a classified ad in their local newspaper, or post fliers on the local community center bulletin board, but that kind of advertising is somewhat limited in terms of the number of people that are likely to see the ad.

So what are these boat owners to do? Where can they go to sell their boat, without having to pay out advertising fees or commissions that are just too high relative to the value of the boat?

To meet the needs of this underserved market, our flagship web site, Tropical Boating, has recently launched Affordable Boats Online. This new site is a classified ad web site designed specifically to offer listings of affordable boats for sale in Florida.

Initially, Affordable Boats Online is offering absolutely free listings — including photographs — to boat owners wishing to offer their boat for sale. Eventually, the site will begin charging for ads, but will always keep ad fees low enough to be a reasonable cost for even very inexpensive boats.

But for now, all ads are completely free of charge to boat owners with an affordable boat for sale in Florida. All boats under $25,000 can be listed — anything from kayaks, canoes and dinghies to jet skis and ski boats. The only requirement is that the boat be located in Florida, and that it listed for sale at no more than $25,000.

If you have an affordable boat in Florida to sell, hop on over to Affordable Boats Online and add your boat. It’s free — what have you got to lose?

My husband and I are lucky enough to live in sunny southwest Florida, where we can go out in our kayaks, our Boston Whaler, or our sailboat year-round, including January. We were just out sailing in Charlotte Harbor in the Corsair F-27 last Sunday. In shorts and shirt sleeves. It can get cold here, sometimes very cold — but within a day or two, it’s generally warm and sunny again. The week-end before that, we were playing with a demo model of the Hobie Adventure Island Kayak in Shell Creek. Over Christmas, when my brother-in-law was visiting, we went out fishing in our Boston Whaler. We lament that we don’t get to use our boats as much as we’d like, but at least we can and do use them whenever we want, regardless of the season.

I sometimes wonder why people up north even bother to own boats. They haul them out of the water in what? September? The boat sits in storage for months, then finally gets put back in the water when? April? May? With what boats cost to own and maintain, and such a short boating season, I have trouble believing that it’s worth it even to the most avid boater.

My husband is selling the F-27. A fellow from Sweden is buying it. What’s his boating season going to be? Two months long?

I guess people up north who enjoy outdoor activities resort to things like snowmobiling or snowboarding for their adventuring fix in the winter months. Me, I’ll stay right here in Florida, thank you very much, and enjoy my time on the water throughout the year. What’s the point of owning boats if you can’t go out and play in them?