This book is the true story of a family sailing adventure around 95 percent of the world over a nine-year period from Sept. 1997 to June 2006. Our youngest daughter Leslie and her husband Bob were married only two weeks before we left Seattle, and their honeymoon became a one-and-a-half-year-long sailing odyssey with my wife Pat and me. Our sailing took us down the U.S. coast into Mexico, through the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, around Africa and across the Atlantic into Florida. We explored islands in Polynesia like the Marquesas, the Societies, the Cooks, Niue, and Tonga. In Melanesia, we stopped at Fiji, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. We crossed the Coral Sea and spent several months in New Zealand and Australia, where we explored the Great Barrier Reef and the Australian Outback before heading to Papua, New Guinea, to explore the Louisiade Archipelago. We traveled the Timor Sea past Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean to the Cocos Keeling Islands, and on to the Comoros Islands. We sailed down the dangerous Mozambique Channel to the east coast of Africa and Cape Town. We sailed the Atlantic to Saint Helena Island, Ilha de Fernando de Noronha off the coast of Brazil, and into Trinidad. Stopping at many Caribbean ports, we made our way to Florida. Richard L. Bennett grew up in Kenmore, New York, and spent his working life in Seattle, a sailor's paradise. He retired as senior project design engineer for the Minuteman ICBM instrumentation system and now lives in Cortez, Florida, an old-time fishing community just north of Sarasota. Publisher's website: http: //sbpra.com/RichardLBennett
