Boat Forum / Cruising / July 2008

Bruce in Bangkok tried to justify his failure at circumnavigating by writing
the following load of self-serving crap:

"As I once told you, "I'm half way round the world and you are sittingin a
Florida swamp", so who's the sailor. Peter is  half way round the world, and
you are still sitting in the swamp, so who's the sailor.

"You can talk all you want but until you actually do sail your comments have
about the same value as a dog baying at the moon.

"But you were talking about "Real Sailors", right? How about you tell us why
a Real Sailor is afraid to use his real name or real address. It sounds to
me as though you are afraid of the whole world,  Wilbur Hubard, he of the
tiny testicles......"

Gratuitous insults to deflect the most valid assertion that Bruce is a
failure.

Look at it this way. NASA says they are going to land a man on Mars by 2015.
2015 rolls around and they haven't managed to land a man on Mars. So they
come out with a press release that states:  "NASA succeeds in it's mission!
NASA is happy to announce that we have landed a man on the Moon. Never mind
that our original goal was to land a man on Mars. We consider that we are a
total success because we at least got about halfway to Mars. So we're stuck
on the Moon, that's better than France has done. They haven't even got to
the Moon. Yes, we at NASA are proud of our accomplishments and anybody who
says we failed is just plain wrong."

Ridiculous? You bet. Yet this is the very same rationale that Bruce in
Bangkok uses. He started out attempting a circumnavigation but failed and
ended up only doing a semi-circumnavigation. But he thinks his failed effort
should be applauded because it went further than somebody else's who never
even aspired to go 'round again. (three times is enough)

After the failure and after the fact, Bruce attempts to justify the failure
by couching it in terms of success. But halfway to a goal is not success. We
all know that. It is failure any way you look at it.

The hapless skipper of the scuttled motor sailer, "Red Cloud" is another
example of this bankrupt thinking and finger pointing in a failed attempt to
minimize his own failure to reach his stated goal. He claims at least he
started towards his goal. This is pathetic and illogical reasoning inspired
by the inability to admit failure.

It is better to plan a trip down to the local grocery store in your SUV and
succeed in your shopping excursion than to plan a circumnavigation or a
coffee run and fail utterly at it, or fail half way at it. In the same
manner, even that fool Bobsprit who used to brag about his little day sails
on Long Island Sound is a more accomplished sailor because at least he
finished what he started out to do. The same cannot be said about Bruce
stuck at the Bangkok dock and the "Red Cloud" coon a.s.

I have spoken.

Wilbur Hubbard