Sunday Fun Day: Thomas Anselmi

While Thomas Anselmi is an avid poker run enthusiast, his favorite Sunday Fun Days are spontaneous. Photo courtesy/copyright Jay Nichols/Naples Image (click image to enlarge).

Let me start off by saying how truly blessed I am to be able to have these Sunday Fun Days. Hard work and dedication has paid off. I am healthy, have my amazing wife, Andrea, my family and great friends with whom I can share these Sundays. Being a member of both the New Jersey Performance Powerboat Club and the Florida Powerboat Club, I have made some lifelong friendships, and it is with a tightknit group of these friends that I have the greatest Sunday Fun Days.

Our unofficial New Jersey motto has always been, “Work hard and play hard.” All of my friends work very hard for what they have and appreciate the time we can take off, relax and blow off some steam.

There are several different ways we enjoy Sunday Fun Day. Most Sundays in New Jersey, a group of us plan to meet at a certain point and run to a specific place for brunch, lunch, or just an afternoon cocktail. Other Sundays are the result of a poker run or rendezvous weekend where we enjoy a casual run from a destination weekend. Each one of those is always unique and interesting.

One Sunday after the Islamorada Poker Run, we were running back to Miami with Bob Christie in his 42-foot Cigarette and Anthony Sauta in his 39-foot Outerlimits and a plane flew down low and challenged us to a race. I turned to my friend Pete Kleban and said, “You can’t make this stuff up!”

Off and on the water, Anselmi and his New Jersey family of performance-boat enthusiasts never come up short for good times.

Yet the best Sunday Fun Days are the unplanned ones that just sort of happen. They usually start earlier in the weekend with something like, “Lets meet at (insert name here) house for brunch and see what the day brings.” Those are the days where, if the weather is bad, the boats sit tight and we turn a backyard into our own Margaritaville—often forgetting that most of us have work the next morning. But, if the weather is good, we rally up the troops and make a 60-mile run down to Atlantic City for the day or maybe run up the coast into the Hudson River for lunch. Those unplanned Sundays on the water, the ones that just sort of happen, always seem to be the most memorable.

Editor’s note: Known to his friends as “Tom A,” Thomas Anselmi and his wife, Andrea, live in Green Village, N.J., and own a Donzi 38 ZR Comp sportboat.

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