For those of you who know Sue and Bill; you may want to skip to the first dated entry. For those of you that don't know us, here is a short history.

Neither Sue nor I are life long sailors. We married in our 50's (with previous kids & grand kids) and honeymooned at the Bitter End Yacht Club in the BVI. We realized we really wanted to live the cruising lifestyle. We took classes, chartered bare boats and improved our sailing skills over the last ten years.

We bought our "big" boat in 2000. It is a 1991 Beneteau Moorings 38. We love the boat but eventually realized it wasn't the perfect cruising boat. It was designed to go out one Saturday and be back the next. It was built as a charter boat. Over the last seven years we have upgraded "Unchained" to become a cruiser. We added 40 gals. of fuel capacity (total 70), Radar, SSB radio, an 8 gph water maker (removed a 50 gal. water tank for more storage room (total now 80 gals.), built in lots of shelves to maximize storage, put 2 solar panels on an arch with GPS and satellite phone antennas, put in an MSD 1 unit to be better neighbors on the sea and lots of little upgrades to make cruising more enjoyable. Oh yes, we added a portable dive compressor to refill our SCUBA tanks.

Now that I finally retired, we are about to leave. The house is leased out, the car stored, mail deferred to a daughter and one winter in Florida for practice. Sue and I are from Tennessee where sailing is minimal and became familiar with the Tenn/TomBigbee waterway in our travels. It is now November 2007 and after spending Thanksgiving with kids we are off down the Florida west coast and plan to spend Christmas in the Bahamas. We plan to cast off about December 1st. Stay tuned.