This thread sure has caught a lot of attention. Pretty clear the OP triggered a very worthwhile, complex discussion with what sounds like a pretty simple request.
First, I don't think the issue is really about hospitality or friendliness or snobbiness. My wife and I did a historic schooner trip out of Rockland, Maine a few years ago. Hauled sails, potbellied stove in the galley, slept on a plywood bunk, the whole Hermann Melville thing. Overall we had a great time, but there was one insufferable guy on there who was just awful. He was a fellow passenger, not crew or captain, but he had sailed with them before so he caught this Captain Bligh know-it-all complex and ordered me to stop hauling a line behind him and "go somewhere else" because he was very tall and my relatively shorter height was messing up his pull angle. Of course the granny from New Jersey pulling behind me was even shorter so there you go buddy, maybe toss her overboard next. There were other examples much worse over the week but you get the idea. Granted he was the one jerk out of about 20, but I can't and won't have a guy like that on my boat.
Or this one: I happen to work in the justice system, generally surrounded by pretty buttoned-up, straight-laced, cautious people. Years ago I was out on our Bayliner runabout at an in-state conference on the river. I took six people out in the evening just for fun. We were all court officials, what I thought was a highly responsible group, but one of the guests sitting in the swing seat directly behind me reached under and around my arm and jammed the throttle all the way up and held it there. "Let's see what this tub can do!" I had to pry his arm off the throttle. We were running in the dark, at night, in a section of the river with lots of what we call dead-heads, underwater trees. I just about had a heart attack and never brought my boat to a work function again.
Has nothing to do with the $100, or the money. Heck, I spent $250 on a new A/C thermostat and a holding tank vent filter sitting on the couch at home this weekend (although I really do think if you can't afford or don't want to do a charter to really see how it goes, as a number of us have suggested, then you can't afford a "big" boat). My point is, unless I know you well, not through an internet forum and not strolling down a dock, or even a club social event -- I'm reluctant to take you out. You might be the most honorable, skilled, reasonable boating or sailing companion on earth, but you might also be the jerk on the Schooner Heritage, or "that guy" on my Bayliner years ago. I have no way of knowing until I get to know you otherwise.
