When Evans and I left for our first circumnavigation in 1992 aboard our Shannon 37, Silk, we walked away from a life that many people would have envied. As international management consultants living in Sweden and working with some of the world's largest companies, our jobs were interesting, exciting and all-encompassing. We were up for partnership election in our firm with good chances of being elected and grabbing the brass ring of the consulting world. If you had asked us why we wanted to give all that up and set off into the unknown, we couldn't have given you the answers that come easily to mind now that we've met the challenges and reaped the rewards.

But I do remember one of our colleagues asking us why we would even consider "such a hare-brained scheme." Evans said, "We've lived our life at one extreme, jetting all over the US and Europe, staying in five-star hotels and eating at three-star restaurants, telling the senior management of multi-billion dollar companies what to do, earning more money than we have time to spend. We'd like to do something as completely different from that as possible, as far to the other end of the spectrum as we can get." As it turns out, that was something cruising could - and did - deliver.

Through our blog, we hear from many people who want to go cruising and through our speaking and writing, we meet many others. When we ask them why they want to go cruising, they often look at us, puzzled, assuming we must know since we went. If they answer, their answers sometimes have more to do with the dream sold by the sailing magazines than with the reality we have come to know and love.

A month or so ago, we were staying with Kirk and Donna Benefiel while we were getting Hawk ready to sail to Connecticut. We were eating dinner on their back deck, overlooking Cypress Creek. The Lagoon 44 catamaran they are preparing to take cruising, Ainulindale, lay at the end of the dock below us, and across the creek we could see the orange stripe of Hawk's mast poking above the trees from where she sat on the hard. Evans said, "You realize most people would say you have it all, don't you? So why do you want to sell this house, give up your security and set off on your boat?"

Kirk sat for a moment contemplating the sweat beading on his beer can above the Styrofoam sleeve. And then he said, "Right now, I know that tomorrow is going to be just like today. I know I'm going to get up and go to work, and some bad things are going to happen and some good things are going to happen. And I'm going to curse the traffic coming home, and we'll have dinner and then I'm going to play some guitar and go to bed and I'm going to do it all again the next day." He looked at Evans.

"I don't want that. I don't want every day to be just the same as the last - to know it's going to be just the same. I want to go to bed not knowing exactly what is going to happen tomorrow. I want to get up and explore a new place, be surprised by something, have an adventure - or not. The other night, over dinner, when you were telling stories about the guy you met down in Chile who went up the Amazon and hit the tidal bore - I want to have met people like that. I want to have stories like that."

Evans nodded. "There's a lot that cruising won't give you. But that," he said, "that you'll be able to find if you go cruising."

Those of you reading this now who are contemplating cruising -why do you want to go? And those of you who have gone, did the reasons you went have anything to do with what cruising was really like?