As part of of our learning process, we wrote down pretty much everything.
We hope this information will be useful to other cruisers and wannabe cruisers, as we once were.
NOTE: The Cruising Handbook is now available as an e-Book - download it free in PDF format.
Our Cruising Adventures
Pat grew upon the west coast of Scotland, where the sea was a constant in her life. She learned to sail a dinghy when she was 9, and often dreamed of sailing adventures, even around the world. She sailed in bigger boats further into the Atlantic, and experienced a dismasting en route to the Outer Hebrides. That experience loaded her up with a cautious and make-do mindset. In her 50's she bought a Pearson 27' and sailed it in the Chesapeake Bay which resurrected her desire to do more.
Evemtually (a bit late in life) in early October, 2000, we sold the Pearson and bought Callipygia and cruised in her until July, 2004. During those four years, we refurbished the boat, prepared ourselves, moved aboard, and travelled over 7,500 nautical miles while visiting some 18 Carribean and West Atlantic countries.
We invite you to read our journals, see maps of the routes we followed, and look at our photographs. Unfortunately, we didn't go digital until near the end of our cruising time, 
so we don't have as many of those as we now wish.
Early on we read somewhere that good seamanship results from a combination of experience and knowledge. When we were beginners we tried to offset our lack of experience by increasing our knowledge through reading and study of the best practices followed by the experts. We hope to pass what we learned along through this website. We'd love to hear if it's useful to you.
We call this handbook "Cruising for Dummies" - and sometimes we were. It's now available as a free e-Book in .pdf format. We've incorporated the lessons we learned into the handbook contents. To help readers navigate, we also made an index of the handbook pages.