People often ask us the same questions, regarding our boating lifestyle. If you ask us these questions on the phone, that would only mean one thing - you haven't been reading our website! Here, we dedicate a section to the most  frequently asked questions, as follows:

Q. How do you boat with the car? (Our number 1 question)
A. When we get to a new destination, we rent a car, drive it to our previous marina or where we last  left the car, and both of us drive the rental and our car back. If the place was too far away,  we would drop off the rental car (certain rental agencies in major cities provide this feature with a drop off charge) and just drive one car back. Our most grueling drive to date was a 17-hours drive one way from Vero Beach, Fl to Solomons Island, Md. Only when we stay put at a place for at least one month do we go and get the car.

Q. Will you go back to work?
A. Who knows? If we get bored and miss work (ok, ok, the paycheck), we just might, but at this moment in time, we are enjoying our lazy days and quite honestly do not miss the politics at work nor the traffic going into work. We do miss the challenge and the people however.

Q. What do you do with your time on the boat since you don't work?

A. We normally get up around 10 am, make ourselves a bloody Mary, have breakfast, bask in the sun, read the paper to catch up with current events, then take a break for lunch. After lunch, we dip in the water, snorkel around the reefs. In the evenings, we get together with other boaters for cocktails and watch the sun lazily melts into the horizon.

So what's missing from this picture? A chef and a maid! Yes, we still have to make all our meals, which means we have to go grocery shopping, do laundry, clean, and tend to all the mundane tasks of everyday life. We find that we do more cleaning on the boat because it's always so dusty. Then, there's always projects - things that cannot wait to get repaired, such as a broken pump (water pump, bilge pump, sump pump, fuel pump, there are so many of them on the boat!), battery and electrical problems, engine problems, you name it. Incidentally, the captain is turning into a true mechanic. Which is a very good thing. Unlike a house, the boat takes more abuse not just because of the elements, but also because of the constant  pounding on the water and the corrosion from the salt water. The ocean can be very unforgiving; being stranded out in the open waters can lend to horror stories, if you live to tell them! Then, there's the adventure of cruising and making landfall at interesting ports-of-call. The logistics of getting there - how to get from point A to point B. This is where the GPS, electronic navigation and charts come in. Like planning a road trip, we pore over the charts, paper as well as electronic, figure out how far we will go, whether there is a good place to anchor or a marina in the vicinity. If heading for a marina, we would have to call and make reservations in advance.

Hobbies - things that we never had the time to religiously pursue while we were working, remember? Now, there is no more excuses. Out came all the cooking, traveling and boating magazines and books we've collected over the years, the sewing machine that was previously collecting dust, video tapes that has never been seen since the taping (and I'm sure we are not the only family to procrastinate)  that needs to be edited, photos that needed to be scanned and organized, websites to be updated and published - these are our current objectives. Because we are always on the go, we haven't been able to sign up for a language class yet or do some volunteer work, something that is on our list of things to do.

Q. How did you know so much about boating?
A. When we bought our first boat, we took "Boating Safety" and "Navigation" classes offered by the U.S. Power Squadron. Most of our knowledge are gathered from reading books and magazines, talking to people we have met along the way, and there's nothing like on the job training, so to speak. 

Q. How did you get into boating?
A. Thanks to our friends Joe and Jon. Joe used to invite us on his sailboat for summer sailing around Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts. Thanks to hurricane Bob (which came through when we were on his boat that weekend), we never got invited back! (We did get invitations, in writing, on his newer and bigger boat). Jon, our condo neighbor used to ride the subway in to work with us. He lured us with stories about the wonderful trips he and his buddies took over the weekends. We never got a firm invite, but we were hooked! We figured if we wanted to do boating, we got to get ourselves a boat. So in 1998 we bought a Bayliner 28 foot, single gas engine boat that we ran around for 3 summers in New England waters before moving to our current boat.