Cindy,

I took my family of FOUR on our Baba 30 for 19 months from Florida into the
Bahamas and on down to the eastern Caribbean. 3 months into it, my wife and
kids were ready to jump ship. We had tried to move on some days with some
pretty rotten conditions. I got a new SSB and was able to analyze weather
better and we seemed to do a little better.

It still took my wife about a year to settle into the cruising lifestyle. A
large part of it was probably being with her spouse (me) 24/7 instead of two
ships passing in the morning and night like our old land based schedule.
The children say they were just tolerating the cruising but now that we are
back, EVERY DAY all three of them reflect on some event of our cruise in a
positive way. My wife is ready to go again! I would have never thought
that would be possible. The kids are different though. They are older now
(12 and 15) and they say NO WAY!

One reason we went when we did (while we were in our mid 40's) is that my
wife's mother died pretty young and my wife was convinced she wouldn't make
it to retirement (she's an RN) so we decided a 2 year sabbatical would a
positive thing.

One of the hardest things about cruising is being away from family. We were
luck though. Both my parents made it and have now moved to Montana to live
near us (or actually the grandchildren). My wife's father did die recently
but my wife was able to spend some time with him before he died. So our
timing was good but now we are back into the public school routine and can't
leave except in the summer when we do not want to leave our place. It looks
like that will be the program for another 6 years or so. We can't leave our
cruising boat in storage THAT long so we should probably get more active and
try to sell it.

As far as money goes, we kept our home and that makes it so we had some
pretty big financial responsibilities that many long-term and some
short-term cruisers do not have. We were frugal on our cruise but still did
many island tours, hiked and swam, ate well, drank a little, and made many
life long friendships and were able to keep our monthly spending to about
$1300 for FOUR of us (we were always on the hook). Now, if you add the cost
of the SSB, a new refridge, a new dinghy and motor and the laptop to replace
the one that got wet, our average monthly expenses went WAY up. But we look
at it like most of those were just more luxuries that we have either sold
now or are using in our land based lives. We work hard and don't make a lot
of money but we actually have replenished our cruising kitty so we COULD go
again for another 19 months but it just isn't going to happen.

I tell you our story since you have obviously considered the cruising and I
encourage you to give it a try. You might be surprised at how well you'll
adjust to the lifestyle change and trading your present daily stresses for a
whole new set of stresses!

Good luck to you with your decision process, Cindy. And you, too, Jack

Boy, I miss the island hopping life......

Ken Beiser
Moonshadow II



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Received on Fri Jan 20 12:53:47 2006