I lost my appreciation of anything that involves large bodies of water after an incident that involved a significant period in an inflatable that was definitely not of my choosing, so my reaction to the purchase of a boat is ‘a hole in the water into which you pour money’.

I know a guy who kept buying larger boats until he reached the point that he had purchased a boat that he could only use a few times a year because that was how often the tide went low enough for him to sail the boat under the bridge over the creek he lived on to get to the bay. He didn’t discover this until after he had purchased the boat and brought it home at the time of one of this tides, and found out afterwards about this problem. He knew when he bought it that it was too wide to put it on the trailer at his house without cutting down a couple of large trees, and about two feet off one side of his house to reach the road. This was however, THE BOAT that he had always wanted.

Apparently, the guy that the county hired to head the Tourist Development Council also has a ‘boat problem’, as the Local Puppy Trainer reports: TDC director resigns after $710,000 yacht purchase

Okaloosa County’s top tourism official stepped down under pressure Tuesday after acknowledging he bought a $710,000 yacht with bed tax money.

Mark Bellinger, who has been the head of the county’s Tourist Development Council since May 2010, told county commissioners he bought the yacht in December to use in a year-long promotional campaign.

County Administrator Jim Curry and the Sheriff’s Office are investigating the purchase.

This guy bought this boat planning on keeping it for a year to use in some tourism promotions. The final promotion involved giving away the boat!

The county is slicing and dicing everything that it does to avoid default, and this guy blows through three-quarters of a million dollars for a boat he intends to give away …

This is your fiscally conservative Republican local government that you keep hearing about, the one that thinks you should run government like a business.