Letter to the editor: Cashing in on a dream boat

I thought you might enjoy the story of how I came to buy and name my boat: My friend David Surfas taught me how to play poker when I was about 8 years old. We played for quarters at home and then I graduated to dollars and then hundreds of dollars in card rooms and casinos.

When you’re in junior high school and you’re a bad basketball player or baseball player nobody wants you on the team. But when you’re a bad poker player everyone wants you to sit at their table. I discovered I had a lot of fake friends at the poker table.

When I first came to this country as a young immigrant my parents used to take my sister and I to Balboa Island and Newport Beach and we would look at all those beautiful houses and yachts. I used to dream about one day owning a yacht of my own. But that was just a dream and sometimes dreams come true.

And then about 4 years ago I bought myself an iPad and I could play poker for free with people all over the world. So I stop playing cash games and was saving thousands of dollars every year. What was I going to do with the money I was saving every year?

I asked my wife Kathy and my friends what they thought about me buying a boat. They all thought I was crazy and it was a lousy idea. Well I had that dream simmering in my mind for all those years since I was a kid. I decided to start looking for a boat to call my own and didn’t care what anybody thought. I went looking for a boat in Long Beach, Marina del Rey, San Pedro and in Ventura. In August 2014 I finally decided on the boat I was going to buy. I bought a 48-foot Hatteras and guess what I called it, Poker Money.

My friends love the boat and my wife and I really enjoy spending the weekends on our condo on the water. When people on the channel pass by and see the name on the back of the boat they think wow, the owner of that yacht must be a fabulous poker player. Little do they know that the money I saved not playing poker is the money I spent buying the boat.

Harvey Youngman

Thousand Oaks, CA

Revving up for second Baja Ha-Ha

Re: Dock Lines: Cruising the Baja Coast with CUBAR and Baja Ha-Ha (Aug. 14, 2015 issue). Sounds like a great cruise. We have friends who’ve done it and loved it. We had a sailboat with which we participate in the Baja Ha-Ha in 2010. We now have a powerboat and would like to make the trip again.

Bruce Crockard

Boating-related facilities a must for SD waterfront

Re: Developers submit proposals for San Diego Bay project (July 1 issue). Kudos to four of the developers (both Seaports, Celebration, and Embarcadero) who included facilities for boaters to access downtown. San Diego has an embarrassing lack of access to downtown for boaters, and all four of these projects would help to change that!

LPinSD

 *Letters edited for clarity and brevity.