In June 1986, at the age of 27, scant days after a year spent working the deck of a high seas longliner, Scott traded his hard-earned cash for a used 41-foot aluminum centerboard sloop that an old sailing friend had noticed for sale at a marina on Fort Lauderdale's New River. He named the 12.25-meter Beaujolais Elan. Having spent all his money, he rapidly returned to work, first taking advantage of his doctoral degree to once more toil as a fishery analyst, and eventually become proprietor of a fishing/adventure charter operation in the Florida Keys. Eight years of overtime sufficed to pay off a small house with canal frontage for the sloop, refit and upgrade Elan, and establish a financial base for a long dreamed-of, open-ended "working circumnavigation".

Nine months before the February 5, 1995 departure on "the big trip" Scott married a gal named Wendy, a mariner in her own right and with similar dreams and aspirations about cruising. As many of you are aware if you've read this column over the past few years, Wendy experienced a sequence of hard-luck health events throughout the marriage. These hardships notwithstanding, she gave birth to a beautiful lad named Ryan Charles Palmer Lea'aetoa Bannerot on the evening of August 28, 1999, during an extended stay in Auckland, New Zealand. A number of folks through the years have inquired as to whatever became of Wendy's health struggles, and basically the answer is that she never found an adequate solution to what has been diagnosed as a long-term chronic pain syndrome. Unfortunately, in December 2006, after what became an extended port stay in Mooloolaba, Queensland, Australia, she made a sudden unilateral decision to leave the marriage and seek her fortunes independently. So we are forced now to bid her farewell, and to wish her well, and this leaves you with the new correspondent team of Scott, now 48, and Ryan, now seven. (We've been writing for SetSail since 2004, so you'll read about Wendy in the articles from '04-'06.)

That said, let's rewind for a quick run-down of the decade when cruising formed the central focus of our lives, and how we are still hanging on to the dream. Elan, a typical-looking hard chine French design, proved to be well up to the task, not real fast with the load we carry but a comfortable rough weather boat. We enjoyed in 1995 an early interlude in southern Costa Rica before visiting Cocos Island, the Galapagos, and sailing onward through French Polynesia. We had so much fun there that we did a cyclone season above the equator in the Line Islands then in 1996 sailed all the way back to the Marquesas, thus enjoying three detailed transits of the Tuamotus and Society Islands before heading southwest to American Samoa, Tonga, and New Zealand. Wendy's severe endometriosis sidelined us for the 1997 season, and only a miraculous treatment from a Tongan bush doctor in 1998 made it possible for her to continue. Returning to New Zealand again later in the year, Wendy became pregnant with our son Ryan, so we stayed put for an 18-month round with the Kiwis. We did lots of work on ELAN and published The Cruisers Handbook of Fishing (2000 & 2004, International Marine) during this long port stay. Ryan took so well to the boating life that we sailed once more to Tonga in 2000 when he was eight months old, and continued north of the equator to the Marshall Islands after an alarming, complex ordeal when Wendy contracted parasitic meningitis.

This unfortunate episode continued to haunt us through our seven-month stay during 2001 in the delightful Marshalls, as cranial nerve damage produced extremely uncomfortable chronic pain in Wendy's right arm. She and Ryan finally flew home as cyclone season arrived, and my old compadre Skip Nielsen came out to help me sail Elan back south to Tonga where my family rejoined the boat. With Western medicine once more stumped for the time being, we looked up our old bush doctor and then spent the cyclone season getting treatments from him in Pago Pago, American Samoa. Ryan meanwhile was speaking some Marshallese, Tongan, and Samoan; snorkeling; and riding a boogie board, all at the ripe old age of two. Alas, Lea'aetoa the medicine man couldn't pull off another miracle this time. His wife Paea joined our crew for a five-month sojourn from the Samoas, Tonga, Fiji, and Vanuatu and finally on to Australia in order to help take care of Ryan. Ryan had a joyous third birthday in Tonga, catching up with all of his old buddies, and we were thrilled with our first exposure to Melanesia. By the time we reached Australia in November 2002, though, both Elan and Wendy needed some attention.

We performed a fairly routine haulout, nothing major, in Bundaberg and then sailed south to Mooloolaba in January 2003 for a restful interlude of writing, surfing, and doctor's visits for the arm pain. Ryan attended pre-school and made good friends. By his fourth birthday he owned two surfboards and a skateboard, and was firmly ensconced in the Aussie beach life, popping up and surfing waves I'd push him on, riding along nimbly until he went aground in the sand with a big smile on his face. At this point it'd been 3 1/2 years since my last return home, and there was a lot of catching up to do with family, our house in Florida which we'd been renting, finances, and Wendy's very persistent arm pain. We put Elan on the hard in Mooloolaba and returned to the States in September 2003 for a strong round on the home front addressing these issues. I worked the 2004 charter season in Florida to support the family. We returned briefly to Australia in August 2004 and purchased property where we could dock Elan, then returned back home to Florida in late November 2004 to work the 2005 charter season and pack up for the move back to Australia in July 2005. In the meantime base camp at the same little canal front house I'd bought so long ago in Florida was wonderful for my son. Ryan had his own room, and played on his first two T-ball teams. The fishing charter business was almost as though I'd never left, and I did more writing work. Being back in the USA was wonderful.

Upon arrival back to Australia in late July 2005, trouble was again brewing on the health front with Wendy, and we were under financial pressure. Wendy had opted for installation of an intrathecal pain pump, and there were serious complications requiring two major surgeries. Meanwhile I was working for Brisbane-based Nomad Sportfishing, which required some work offshore. Ryan accompanied me as much as possible, allowing Wendy some time to recuperate on land. Poor Elan remained tied forlornly to the dock out in back of the house. This basically continued through the upheaval of Wendy's recent departure.

Ryan is now seven. He is everything a parent could ever hope for - very intelligent, very athletic, and a real kindhearted yet tough kid. He has excelled in sports. He remains very attached to Elan, the only environment he knew for his first three years. He's a great free diver and fisherman, and he's now acquired quite a bit of sea time cruising the length of the Great Barrier Reef with me aboard Odyssey in our work for Nomad, as well as spending an interlude recently out at Marion Reef, an isolated outpost in the Coral Sea.

Nevertheless, it looks like circumstances will finally push us homeward to Florida at last. Ryan has a very well established base there, and the Bahamas are a 12-hour sail away from our back doorstep. We'll reconnect with family and friends, and stabilize at home for a while. The great thing is having a floating home close at hand in the form of a rugged, bluewater cruising sloop, always ready for action, and to be honest, our new situation may very well remove many impediments to spending more time offshore and doing the things we both love. As we make our way back from Australia to Florida, Ryan and I will be checking in often.