I am a recovering boat addict. While many of you may laugh when you hear that, boat addiction is a serious condition. If left untreated, boat addiction can have the following consequences: The winter in the Pacific Northwest is the season of boat shows. For many years we would go to these shows and look at all of the really expensive boat parts, and expensive boats, and expensive boatyards advertising their expensive services (see a pattern here?) »

It was time to think outside the box. I had been focusing too much on traveling by boat and had finally come to the conclusion that by traveling by boat, you become a slave to that boat. Everything in your life revolves around maintaining the boat. The main focus of our trip should be on the experience of travel. Experiencing new countries, new cultures, new foods, and not trying to find new boat parts. I would rather spend my free time inside a museum »

Even though we were not up to crossing oceans on a sailboat, the cruising life was still appealing. We came up with an alternate plan that sounded very reasonable. We would spend a year or two sailing around the Caribbean. With this approach, we would not have to buy a sailboat that was capable of offshore sailing. We could manage this feat in a sailboat that was designed for only coastal cruising, which would save us a lot of money and would have »

My favorite television show when I was a kid was Gilligan’s Island. I thought the castaways were the luckiest people in the world to live in such a beautiful place. Ever since then, I had dreamed of sailing off across the horizon and making landfall at a tropical island paradise. When I finally had a chance to buy a small sailboat as an adult, I jumped at it. But before buying I figured it would probably be smart to learn how to sail first. So, »