Glenn, Sailing a small boat is not as hard is it appears. I went 20 years between boats. It seemed daunting at first but a little tiller time will work wonders. Your wife will be miserable in the cabin of an M-15 under sail. You can sleep in an M-15. You can store stuff there. You can answer the call of nature in privacy, if not comfort. You can not sit up in the cabin. Going in and out under sail is tough with the standard mainsheet arrangement. Bob E. does participate in this group, as does Jerry M. Bob, like many small business owners, depends on a cell phone. Bob builds boats, and this is the time of year when people buy boats. So Bob may not have much time to answer you inquiries from a keyboard. I sympathize with your hearing loss as I have a minor loss myself, and grew up in a small town that was the home of the state school for the deaf. Perhaps you can use a keyboard and TTY relay service to call his cell phone. I really do not understand your AOL comment. Doug does not host the MSOG site through AOL. Keith, the owner of this mailing list, commented recently that AOL problems caused some people to be inadvertently unsubscribed by the list server. I believe Keith is an IT professional and Doug is a scientist who develops software and maintains a database used world wide by other scientists. There are lots of ways to communicate over the internet. I like e-mail, because I can save a message of interest for later reference. I download monthly archive files to my hard drive and use my favorite word processing software to search the messages. Yes, message content does stray from the subject line, but I believe that was true also of your first blog entry. There are other sailing groups that use several means of communications, like a list server, yahoo group and web forum. The comments from those users is that it is necessary to post messages in several places in order to reach everyone, and it is difficult to remember where to look for that important piece of information they saw last year. I would prefer that our small group not fragment as other groups have. steve Steve R. M-15 #119 Lexington, KY