For thirty-one years I made the tools that make car parts. I was a tool-and-die engineer at the same shop in the western suburbs from 1967 until they offered the early retirement package in the spring of 1998, and I took it so fast the man from personnel hadn't finished his sentence. We'd had a sailboat on Lake St. Clair since 1987, and every winter for eleven years, when the boat was on stands under a tarp and the snow was coming in sideways, I'd get out the charts of the Bahamas and look at them. Sherry thought I was looking at fishing spots.

That summer we sold the house we'd lived in for twenty-nine years, the snowblower, the second car, the dining room set and about two-thirds of everything else we owned, put the rest in Jon's basement, and moved onto the boat. Our friends thought we'd lost our minds. Some of them still do. — M.

I was an emergency room nurse for twenty-eight years. I've seen what happens to people who wait for "someday." Some of them never get there. When Martin came home with the retirement papers, I said, "Then let's go now, while our knees still work." I'm the one who called the realtor. He likes to tell people this was his idea. It was his idea. I'm the one who made it happen. — S.

Close Tolerance is a 38-foot fiberglass cutter, built in 1983, which we've owned since 1987. A cutter has two sails up front instead of one, which is handy when the wind picks up, because you can roll up the big one and still have the small one. She draws five feet, which is about as deep as you want in the Bahamas, where a lot of the water you'll cross is ten feet deep or less and some of it is a lot less. We have a diesel engine that I know better than I know some of my relatives.

The name is from my old trade. In tool and die, a close tolerance means you made the part right, to within a thousandth of an inch or better. I thought it was the right name for a boat that two people are going to live on in a space about the size of a one-car garage. Sherry says it describes how she feels about me after a week of rain.

What we added for the trip: two solar panels on a frame over the stern, so we can run the lights, the radio and the refrigerator at anchor without the engine; a hard dinghy and a small outboard; a second anchor and a lot more chain; GPS; an emergency radio beacon; and a shortwave receiver so we can hear the weather forecasts for boats. Sherry named the dinghy Band-Aid. She says every big boat needs one. — M.

We took the boat from Lake St. Clair to Florida in the fall of 1998: across Lake Erie, through the Erie Canal with the mast down and lying on deck, down the Hudson, and down the coast and the Intracoastal Waterway. That's all in the log. But the part everybody asks about is the Gulf Stream.

The Gulf Stream is a river in the ocean, forty or fifty miles wide, running north between Florida and the Bahamas at two or three knots and sometimes more. On a calm day it's just blue water, the bluest you've ever seen. The trouble is the wind. When the wind blows from the north, against the current, it stands the waves up steep and close together, and a 38-foot boat has no business out there. So you wait for a cold front to go through, wait for the north wind behind it to die out and swing around to the east or south, and then you go, fast, before the next front comes.

We waited six days in No Name Harbor at Key Biscayne, with a dozen other boats doing the same thing, listening to the forecast every morning. On Tuesday, December 15, we left at 4 in the morning with the stern light of the boat ahead of us to follow. You aim well south of Bimini, because the current carries you north the whole way across. It took us ten hours, most of it motor-sailing in a long, easy swell, and Sherry was only a little seasick, which for her is a record. We came in to Bimini in the afternoon flying the yellow quarantine flag, I walked up to clear Customs and Immigration with our papers, and when I came back Sherry had the swim ladder down and her bathing suit on, waiting for the word. — M.

I have never seen water that color in my life. You can see the bottom in twenty feet of water like it's a swimming pool. I sat on the bow and cried a little. Martin pretended not to see. — S.

The Exumas are a chain of small islands, the cays (say "keys"), running a hundred miles or so southeast from near Nassau, with the deep ocean on one side and the shallow Bahama Bank on the other. We spent January working our way down them, a few miles at a time, and February and most of March in George Town at the bottom. Here's what a winter there is like. — S.

Provisioning. Before we crossed, we filled every locker on the boat in Florida: canned goods, rice, pasta, coffee, paper towels, flour, powdered milk, and enough peanut butter to stucco a house. Everything in the Bahamas comes in by boat, so it costs more, sometimes twice as much. Fresh vegetables are a treat. In George Town there's a grocery store with its own dinghy dock out back, which I think is the most civilized thing I've ever seen.

The mail boat. The out islands get their supplies, their mail and a lot of their visitors from the mail boats that run out of Nassau once a week or so. When the mail boat is in, the whole settlement is down at the government dock: crates of eggs and lettuce, building lumber, a refrigerator, somebody's nephew home from school. You plan your shopping around it. If you miss it, it's canned peas for a week.

Conch. Conch (say "conk") is the big sea snail with the pink shell, and in the Bahamas it's on every menu: conch salad with lime and peppers, cracked conch fried, conch fritters, conch chowder. A fisherman at Black Point showed Martin how to get one out of the shell: you knock a little slit in just the right place near the top, cut the muscle loose, and it slides out. It took Martin six tries. The fisherman did it in ten seconds and laughed at us the whole time. We deserved it.

Other cruisers. This is the part nobody told us about. There are hundreds of boats wintering in the Bahamas, and most of them are people like us: retired, a little sunburned, from Michigan and Ontario and Ohio and New England. In George Town there were more than three hundred boats in the harbor. There's a morning radio net where people announce what's going on (yoga on the beach, a potluck, somebody needs a part, somebody has a part), volleyball every afternoon on the beach on Stocking Island, and in March a cruisers' regatta with sailboat races, games and a talent show, in which Martin played the harmonica, and I'll say no more. Everybody knows you by your boat name. We're "the Close Tolerances." I patched up more cut feet and coral scrapes this winter than I can count. I was retired for about three days.

Water. No faucet. You carry it in jugs from a marina at so much a gallon, or catch rain off the awning. We learned to do the dishes in a cup of water and rinse in salt water. A real, long, hot shower at a marina is the best $5 you'll ever spend.

Everybody asks, so here it is. I keep every receipt in a coffee can and add them up at the end of the month. For our first year, October 1998 through September 1999, we spent an average of about $1,620 a month to live aboard, counting groceries, fuel, marinas, insurance, repairs and everything else. In the Bahamas, where we anchored out almost every night, it was about $1,450. Traveling down the waterway last fall, with a marina most nights, it was closer to $1,800. Back in Livonia, between the property taxes, the furnace, two cars and the snowblower, it was more than that just to stand still.

All the numbers, with every category, are on What We Spend. — S.

Hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30. We decided before we left Michigan that we would not spend it in the Bahamas. We crossed back to Florida on May 2 and went up the St. Lucie River at Stuart to a marina well inland, behind a lot of land, with good pilings and floating docks, which is about as sheltered as you can get on this coast. Our insurance company wanted a written hurricane plan before they'd cover us for the summer, and we gave them one: where the boat would be, how we'd tie it, what comes off, and where we would go.

Summer in a Florida marina is hot, buggy and quiet. We do the projects we put off all winter, I varnish, Sherry reads, we ride our folding bicycles to the grocery store and the library, and every afternoon there's a thunderstorm at 3 o'clock you could set your watch by. We watch the weather on TV like other people watch ball games. — M.

Well, we found out whether the plan works.

Hurricane Floyd came across the Atlantic in the second week of September and got very big and very strong very fast. By Monday the 13th it was a major hurricane headed for the Bahamas, and every forecast had it coming awfully close to us after that. Up and down the coast people were boarding up and leaving.

So we did what the plan said. On Monday we took off both headsails and the mainsail and stowed them below, took down the bimini, the dodger and the solar panels, lashed down everything that could not come off, pulled the dinghy out and tied it upside down on the dock, doubled every dock line, put chafe gear on every line where it touches anything, and ran extra lines to the far pilings so she'd sit in the middle of the slip whichever way the wind came. It took us all day and most of the evening. Every other boat on our dock was doing the same thing, and everybody helped everybody. Tuesday morning the marina asked all of us who live aboard to go ashore, and we did, to a shelter at a school inland, with two bags, the boat papers, the photo albums and Sherry's medical kit. — M.

The shelter was a gym full of cots and very nice people, and of course they found out I was a nurse in about twenty minutes, so I spent the night helping the Red Cross nurse with blood pressures and an elderly man who'd forgotten his pills. Floyd crossed the Bahamas as a big, powerful storm and then turned north and stayed out at sea off the Florida coast. We had wind and rain overnight, but nothing like what it could have been, and on Wednesday afternoon they let us go back. Then it went on and hit North Carolina, and we've been watching the pictures of the flooding there and feeling sick about it. — S.

The boat was fine. One chafed line and a lot of leaves on deck. We were very, very lucky, and we know it. Friends of ours in the Abacos, Curtis and Edna Pinkston, who've had a house on one of the cays there for years and who we met in George Town, weren't as lucky: the storm took their dock and a good part of their roof. They're safe, which is what matters, and they're already rebuilding. We're going to go over to the Abacos first this winter and help, with a hammer and a cooler. — M.

The whole day-by-day is in the log.

• Retired to the Keys — two Ohioans who retired to the Florida Keys in 1996: fishing, hurricanes, the heat and no regrets. Neighbors, more or less, and fellow Midwesterners who came to their senses.
• Gone Coastal — a former corporate lawyer who quit it all to run a charter boat in the Virgin Islands. He says it is not all sunsets. He is right.