Well, our initial plan was to have our boat up here in the lakes for the next 5-6 years as we develop our sailing skills and have a ton of fun. We would then sell the boat here and get our live aboard catamaran down in the Caribbean. That would be our 'forever' boat and we'd spend our retirement idling around the Caribbean with absolutely nothing to do hehe.

Of course, the recent storms that have ravaged the Caribbean have put a bit of a kink into that plan. Many of the cats that were available have taken severe damage and it'll be years before they are replenished. This is a double edged sword since there will be less inventory but the available boats, when we're ready, will be newer.

To hedge our bets, we've decided that it might be prudent to open up our search to include boats that we may be on for quite a while. This means that we're looking upwards of 42' vs. the original 36'-38'. There is a very good possibility that this boat may become our forever boat and go with us to the Caribbean. Not that this is an issue really but it will be a monohull vs. a cat. The marinas up here are not really geared towards handling cats. Slips aren't wide enough and even a double berth might not accommodate a boat that's 21' to 22' wide. C'est la vie as they say.

On a different note, we are heading to Aruba after Thanksgiving to experience the lower Caribbean. We're excited to see how the diving and the water is down there. The ABC islands are below the normal hurricane belt and are relatively safe from big storms. It'll give us a chance to look around the area a bit.

Now the new news. For those of you that have boats, I've written an app for Android called Boat Log. I know it's a really impressive title. While there are a lot of boat log apps in the store, none of them did everything I wanted so I wrote one. This app will handle all the information that you need as well as track your sails in real time!

You can check it out here: Boat Tracker