Jack ended up putting in 27 years in the Navy before he retired in 1996 as a captain, and the couple never did have kids.

"Unfortunately," Sue says, because Jack - the guy all his Navy buddies knew as a hell-raising, hard-drinking helicopter pilot - really did love kids.

So as close as they were to their families back in New Jersey, home for Jack and Sue became the Kismet, a 48-foot sailboat the McAfees first saw in a marina in Denmark - locked up tight in ice from the winter.

When May got there and finally freed the boat, they sailed south, down to Turkey and Greece and other parts of the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. The next year, they joined a regatta that went to Syria and Lebanon and Israel, among other exotic stops in the eastern Mediterranean.

Their sailing stayed pretty smooth until 1999, when Jack - who was getting a second hip replacement to ease excruciating pain - learned that his hip wasn't his real trouble. Doctors found a tumor in his back, and it turned out to be an aggressive cancer of the bone marrow called multiple myeloma.

His docs told him he might live two or three years, Sue remembers, or he could last five if he got lucky.

Jack thanked them for their help and information and went home - back to the Kismet, back to seeing and sailing the world. He packed up the drugs the doctors prescribed for him, and when this crew of two pulled into a new port, Jack would find a hospital and try to explain that he needed his dose of chemotherapy.

"They looked at us like we were nuts," Sue says now - and she doesn't disagree when Jack's sister, Jill McAfee-Bianco, offers a second opinion on that diagnosis.

"You were nuts," says Jill, who's visiting from her home in Jacksonville, Fla., for Jack's memorial service today at St. Joseph's Church in Somers Point.

Sue gives a little laugh, then does what her husband always wanted to do: She goes on with the adventure, goes on telling about their 20-year plan to sail around the world in the sailboat Jack maintained so meticulously.

"It was always the prettiest boat in the marina," Sue says - meaning any marina they were ever in. And they were in a whole lot of them in the thousands of miles they covered on the water.

They ended up cruising and living for most of six years on the Kismet, two of them after Jack knew he had cancer. And he made it through nine years with the disease he wasn't supposed to survive for five, which is probably why his oncologist took to calling John David McAfee his miracle patient.

* * *

Still, reality finally ended the around-the-world dream, and in 2002, the McAfees came back to land. The next year, they sold the Kismet and used the money to buy a house not far from where Jack's parents raised him, his brothers, Jim and Joe, and his sister after the family moved to Somers Point.

The McAfee home was right across the street from what is now Greate Bay Country Club, and Jack's first job was caddying there - sometimes getting up at 4 a.m. to get to the course early enough to make money. Plus he could play golf at the course, and the sport became one of his lifelong passions.

Next came summers on Ocean City's Beach Patrol, the start of his days working around the ocean. Jack always liked the girls on the beach, and he made enough there and the golf course to pay a lot of his own freight at Xavier University in Cincinnati - where Jack was born when his father, Earl, worked for the Federal Aviation Administration there.

Jack got his degree in 1969 and went right into the Navy. He did three tours in Vietnam - two living aboard ships, but one in the country - and saw plenty of combat piloting helicopters.

His career definitely leaned toward the Pacific Ocean. He and Sue spent four years in Hawaii and owned a home in San Diego, although they rented it out when cruises or postings took Jack to Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong and more of the Far East.

Sue followed him around to many of those stops, but in a 32-year marriage, the longest they ever lived in one place was almost a tie. There were six years on the Kismet and then the last six in the more conventional Egg Harbor Township home that became the next big project for a guy who needed to stay busy to stay happy.

There's no question which home Jack preferred, but it's also true that he was in pretty bad shape for a lot of his time back near the Atlantic Ocean. Sue and his sister, Jill, say he came close to dying several times as he fought his cancer, so often that the family just got used to him miraculously bouncing back - and then going out fishing a week later.

(Fishing was another passion for Jack, although he apparently lacked either luck or talent at it. Sue claims that in their six years on the Kismet, he caught exactly two fish - no matter how much time he spent trying.)

His last big comeback was just on Halloween, Jack's 61st birthday. His whole family was around, including Jill up from Florida, and as a special present, her 12-year-old son, Tim, came too. Tim was Jack's favorite nephew, and the guest of honor looks pretty much like himself in the pictures from his last party.

But just a few days after that, Jack was so sick that he couldn't even vote in the presidential election - despite the McCain-Palin sign that's still up in the old Navy pilot's front yard.

Jack McAfee died Nov. 7. He donated his body to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick and wanted any contributions in his memory to go to the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, hoping to help find a cure for the disease that ended this captain's cruise around the world too soon, but never could stop his his spirit.

E-mail Martin DeAngelis:

MDeangelis@pressofac.com