Sail Far Live Free

"You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality." - Walt Disney I've been pondering favorite sailing locations and am finding it difficult to narrow the list to a reasonable number. I'm beginning to realize that the problem isn't necessarily that the Great Lakes are an amazing cruising ground (they are!) full of "best locations", but rather that my true favorites are usually the last place we visited or the next place we're planning to sail to. The reality is that the memories of quality family time spent  getting there  and being there make just about any place we've sailed part of my "best" list. Old Walt had it right when he singled out people as the key ingredient. Still, I'll give it a shot to identify just one location in response to LOOK's quest to find the world's best/most exotic sailing locations (see here ) based solely on places

"Islands belong to the sea like the dark sands of my memories. When the morning comes they are stepping stones to the sun. And the mighty blue ocean keeps breaking on every shore. Like the spirit that binds us together, we are so much more than islands..." -John Denver, lyrics from Island It's a gripping disease, but not one you'll find shown on WebMD or even in the pages of most dictionaries. Islomania is an obsession and an extreme partiality for islands. But it's more than that. Islomaniacs crave isolation from something . Sometimes it's isolation from society, sometimes isolation from technology, and sometimes isolation from reality. Garden Island (left) and Hog Island (right) breaking the horizon in northern Lake Michigan (photo by K. Walters) Were islomania better known, I'm sure those afflicted with it would be labelled as escapists, or some other -ist or -ism. What the labelers don't know is that escapists and islomaniacs are al