Fifteen years ago we began an annual winter vacation chartering sailboats in the Caribbean after originally catching the sailing bug on our honeymoon in 1988.  Each year we stayed a little longer.  John reached an epiphany after considerable financial analysis, complete with spreadsheets and graphs, that could only be understood by engineers. According to the data, there comes a point when it simply makes financial sense to own a sailboat rather than charter.  Low and behold, the perfect boat became available well before planned but conveniently around the time the youngest of our two sons graduated high school.  So off we go on Echoes, a ’96 Catalina 42′ MKII, and her dinghy named Sea Alice, who are slipped on Marco Island, Florida.  As any boat owner will tell you, especially one of a 20 year old boat, there are mysterious additional costs of boat ownership.  John plugged these numbers back into the analysis and found that to make boat ownership affordable we needed to work less and sail more.  So we are semi retired, semi sane, semi competent sailors on a completely awesome adventure and we invite you to follow along with us.