We acquired Encore I in December 1990, and she was first launched in May 1991.  At that time, we were members of the Grosse Pointe Club (aka "the Little Club") on Lake St. Clair near Detroit.  She was our 4th sailboat, following "L'esprit", "Yasumi", and "Moonlighting", and is a Beneteau First 45f5 sloop, built in France. 

During 1991 and the summer of 1992, we made our traditional summer cruises in the Great Lakes, typically to the North Channel of Lake Huron.  1992 was a particularly cold and wet summer, and in September we decided to ship Encore to Florida, with the plan to sail in the Bahamas and the Caribbean for perhaps a few years.

A few years turned into nearly ten years, and Encore traveled over 30,000 miles going around the world.  From 1992 to 1997, we sailed the Eastern Caribbean, from the Virgin Islands down to Trinidad and Venezuela.  We spent several seasons based in St. Lucia, and the last few in Antigua.  All in all we visited nearly every island at least once, and even took side trips to places like Angel Falls (the highest waterfall in the world) in central Venezuela.

In 1997, we joined the Expo '98 Round the World Rally.  This consisted of a fleet of about 55 boats from Europe and North America, that would sail from Portugal or Fort Lauderdale, to the Caribbean, transit the Panama Canal, and take the "Coconut Run" through the South Pacific to Australia.  Stops would include the Galapagos, French Polynesia, Tonga, Fiji, and Vanuatu.  From there, the Rally continued to South Africa, Brazil and then back to the Caribbean, and to Europe.

We left the Rally in Darwin, Australia to join a smaller group of boats (the Rally "Rebels") to cruise Indonesia, Singapore, Malyasia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and then up the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.  While the Expo '98 Rally finished their circumnavigation by May 1998, we had slowed down and only reached Turkey by August 1998.  By then, our son Geoff had to start school at the University of Michigan, and Paul had agreed to run a high tech subsidiary of a Fortune 500 energy company.  As a result, our cruising was reduced to 2-3 months each summer, slowly sailing the Med, visiting Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, and Spain.

By 2001, we had already acquired Encore II, which was in the Bahamas, and we thought about selling Encore I, but later changed our mind and planned to ship her back to the USA as we didn't have the time to sail across ourselves.  At first, we couldn't get space reserved on the specialized yacht freighter, and we joined a yacht club in Mallorca, Spain and hauled Encore I out for the winter.  At the last minute, space was available, and Encore crossed the Atlantic to Fort Lauderdale, via Dockwise Transport.  After being trucked back to Michigan, Encore was relaunched in the fresh water of the Detroit River, in the spring of 2002, nearly ten years after being away. 

Since the, we've continued our summer cruises in the Great Lakes.

The following links include our logbook for our first world cruise, as well as photo galleries of our other voyages aboard Encore I.