About Us

We are recently retired from the medical device industry in which we worked for over 20 years. The last 3 companies we worked at we worked there together.

Ken has been a sailor since the age 10, learning most of what he knows on the subject from his father, Bob, starting with sailing dinghies. Over the years he has cruised the New Jersey, and Florida coasts and in the Virgin Islands before beginning the cruising life with Ann in 1997.

Ann had only very limited experience on sailboats before meeting Ken but has taken to it very well. Besides being a willing student in the school of "hard knocks", she has also taken classes through the US Power Squadron up through Advanced Piloting.

Sam is a large male tabby who has also taken to sailing very well. The boat is as much his home as any house on land. You can see in the photo at the right he is on the counter-top, it's not level, because the boating is heeling while sailing. To Sam , this is no big deal. See more pictures of Sam

Our first "date" was actually a day sailing out of Ft. Lauderdale. That set the tone for our lives together. Since then we have been doing all that we can to spend more time cruising, together.

We first went cruising beginning in June of 1997 on our previous boat, Into the Mystic. In August 1998 we took a break from cruising to refill the cruising kitty. After doing contract work for 7 months we had saved enough money to get back aboard Into the Mystic.

We spent the next 8 months cruising the Windward islands (southeastern Caribbean) and the out-islands off the Venezuelan coast.

On November 1, 1999 we began a passage from Isla de Margarita, Venezuela to St. Martin. This is nearly 400 miles. It took us 3 1/2 days and we had a great run. Two weeks after our arrival in St. Martin we were joined there by an unwelcome visitor - Hurricane Lenny (also known as Wrong-way Lenny since it went west-to-east). We had prepared the boat as best we could and put out 5 anchors but the winds stayed hurricane strength for 48hrs and in the end, Into the Mystic was badly damaged (along with about 130 other boats in Simpson Bay Lagoon).

It was a very trying time but we had insurance (many others didn't) and we left St. Martin heartbroken at loosing our home but resolved to get another boat as soon as possible. We wanted to go cruising again as soon as we could save enough money and outfit the boat properly.

We found Julia B in February 2000, moved aboard her, and went back to work in the medical device industry. After 3 1/2 years of hard work (both on the job and on the boat) we were ready to get back on the water. We left our jobs in October 2003 and this site describes what we have been doing since then