The Upgrade
What happens if you booked the smallest rental car but the guy before you just takes the last small car available. Right, the rental company gives you the convertible. It is what they call an upgrade. It never happened to you? Read this.
With our 9 metre Nausika�, we are usually the smallest boat in port. This is nice when it comes to harbour manoeuvres, making friends (people are always more sympathetic to people on a small sailing boat rather than to people on a large posh motorboat), harbour fees and finding a space in an overcrowded harbour. From our small boat we gaze up at the big boats. Of course we wonder how it would feel to be on the other side. There where the grass is always greener. How would it feel to sit on a huge boat like a millionaire (without paying the huge harbour fees of course)? To be able to cook pizza or cakes in the oven (we don�t have an oven in our Nausika�), or to choose from 4 bedrooms or from two toilets�
After the last storm, our friends Juan and Simela went on a 6 week holiday. They own a luxurious 45,5ft fast sailing yacht, with which they make charters as a business and did not like the idea to leave it unattended so we offered them to look after it. We moored next to it in Porto Cristo. Because we are working outside and inside our own boat, and don�t want to sleep in the mess, we moved to the big boat. We now have the highest mast in the harbour (over 22 meters high, about double the height of our own mast), a stylish Italian design interior (Pininfarina), a big kitchen with headroom and an oven where we can cook all the things we cannot make on our own boat, 2 toilets etc. It really feels like a luxurious house.
�Our� new bright white boat draws a lot of attention from the elderly tourists that stroll and roll by every day. These people are transported to Porto Cristo by buses to visit its famous caves and get some time off to shop and stroll around the town. The look at the\ shabby looking -no rolexes!- �youngsters� on board, hanging their washing to dry on this posh large boat, makes them wonder. I think we can safely assume that we are among the most photografed objects here in PC. But do we also regard our own Nausika� in a different way now? Do we walk with our noses in the air and look down at all the �small� boats around us? No! We will happily move back and live on our Nausika� when the time is there. After all, she still gives us the most fun per Euro we spend, and we know where everything is on this boat and how to fix it when it breaks.
