Greetings from DFW

Hello all,

Greetings from DFW. My wife and I have a mild case of retirement fever. We are at the point where we can see light at the end of the tunnel but can't make out the details yet. We really think some type of cruising might be right for us but there's so much to learn and other than cruising on the big ships we have no cruising experience.

Our boat for the last few years is a 15.5' Bell Works Drifter canoe.

The details we are looking to bring into focus are:

Is cruising right for us: ??
Destination: Loop, coastal cruising, bahamas, beyond
Propulsion: Power versus sail
Boat type: ?? obviously a trawler of some sort is high on the list

We have a few years to go but soaking up information from this forum has been an adventure in itself.

Thanks to all for sharing,

Guy

Welcome! We lived and worked in DFW for many years before we took time off to go cruising full time. We were living in Dallas proper in the Preston Hollow neighborhood. I still have clients in mid-cities. An advantage there is that you are equidistant to all the great US coastal cruising grounds.

The very best thing we did was to do some extensive chartering in the PNW, SF Bay, and Florida. Although we had done all sorts of boating on an ad hoc basis on and off our whole lives, we each got a lot of value taking organized courses from Club Nautique in SFO and Sea Sense in FL, which in turn qualified us to bareboat charter some nice "trawlers".

When it came time to buy a boat to cruise and liveaboard full time, we had a pretty firm idea of our personal "must haves" and "nice to haves". Most important of all we had learned that the cruising life was for us, and got to do a lot of boating all along the way.

Greetings,
Welcome aboard. Enjoy the chase...