usual cruiser. Not even your normal off shore long term cruiser. To try and use Fatty and his wife to compare anything with will give you very slanted perspective. In the first place, he's been doing it so long he can't come back. Unless some great aunt died and left him a fortune or he nailed a best seller book deal he couldn't enter the main stream America even if he wanted to. Not that he would ever want to anyway. I met fatty back in 1989 after he lost his boat in Hurricane Hugo. He, his wife and daughter Roma-Orion had spent the Hurricane anchored in the anchorage at Ensenada Honda on the small island of Culebra (the Spanish Virgins) off of St. Thomas. The eye went over them with the wall somewhere around 200 Mph plus. Not many boats survived and they lost just about everything. He bought a salvaged boat and after all was said and done, moved back aboard and rebuilt her. They remained on that boat for years. The eye missed me because at the last minute I decided to go to the Red Hook area of St Thomas and not Culebra. Fatty had a radio show on Saturday morning devoted to cruising where he talked about various topics and he was pretty hard core even back then. He was driven ashore during the storm and manage to get up to a small condominium complex, kick in the door and hide out. As other shipwrecked sailors came by he would call out to them and they ended up with about 25 people in this condo. He would tell them as they came in "Mi Casa, su casa" which, if I spelled it right means "My house is your house." After a couple of hours he said that to some guy and, indeed, it was the guys house. I guess the fellow took it pretty well. Not that anyone could or even would do anything about something like that under the circumstances. They ended up calling it "Fattyland" and it was a pretty good party from what I was told. True story. He had been cruising for several years prior to Hugo and that's been a long time now. My point is he's the one percent so you can't use him as a yardstick for anything. But I do admire his fortitude and that of his wife Carolyn's as well.