We take delivery of our new sea home, a Saint Francis 50 catamaran, on October 1st, 2006. Hopefully we will have sold our dirt home by then. We will be appointing our boat and working out the kinks between Fort Lauderdale and the Bahamas during the month of October 2006. With some luck we'll be ready for guests by November 2006. We plan to log our adventures here with commentary, photos and video.

We love our boat and we love our boat's name: "Swingin' on a Star". It is a favorite tune of ours and about the only thing I can play on the ukulele. It also has a certain maritime flair. That said, I didn't really go through all of the ramifications of this name as carefully as I could have. For instance, cruisers are often known amongst other cruisers by their boat's name instead of their own. So one of my first tasks is to find a nice short name for "Swingin' on a Star" that circumvents the obvious nickname; "The Swingers". I'm not too happy with one of the possible abbreviations, "SOS", either.

Also of note is the fact that our boat is currently named Venus. She hit the water in mid December of 2005 and sailed straight from Cape Town to the Miami boat show. In Miami she received the Cruising World Magazine Boat of the Year award in the Catamaran class, which was duly won by her sister ship, Aphrodite, at the Annapolis show four months earlier. Now I'm not all that superstitious, but renaming a boat is a big bugaboo. If we want any of our hard core boat friends to even set foot on her we will have to perform a rather involved de-naming ceremony, see that her keels clear the water, and then re-launch her with her new name. I keep having Angel Heart flash backs, but I'm sure everything will work out just fine if we follow the protocol.

http://www.stfrancismarine.com/