Before I begin on any comments or discussion I should probably say a few things about my book, Lessons from Summer School. This book tells of the beginnings. It relates how and why Nancy and I found each other and came to love life on a boat, and how we bought a trawler that we named Summer School. And it tells of our first great adventure on Summer School, taking it down the ICW for the first time all the way to the Florida Keys and out to the Bahamas during a sabattical. It also tells of how and why we found new jobs and relocated to Easton, PA (from Pueblo, CO), and how we then brought Summer School north on the ICW, through Chesapeake Bay to the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal where we planned to rent a permanent slip. More about this book can be found at www.pairohermits.com/lessons.html.

Summer School

This is Summer School, our only home from 1996 to 2001. For two years we traveled up and down the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) between the Chesapeake (in the summers) and Florida (in the winters), but most of the time we were cruising on the waterway. In late 1998 we settled into a marina in Madeira Beach, FL, because we had run our of money and we needed jobs, which we found. In 1999 we got seriously sick: my leukemia came out of remission, I needed chemotherapy, and I was hospitalized with acute pneumonia, while my wife, Nancy, was diagnosed with cancer and had to have surgery and also chemotherapy. We survived. In 2000 we knew we would have to leave the boat. So we took our last cruise, our Millenium Cruise, one more time up the ICW to North Carolina, then on to the Chesapeake and the Potomac in the fall. By winter we were back in NC where we sold Summer School in Jan. 2001 and moved to the mountains and a land home in WV. 1800 Days is the story of this part of our lives.