The only escape to sanity was the love of boats and sailing. Many years of recreational boating including various sailing schools, boat building and Pacific and Caribbean chartering, honed his skills as a mariner and peaked his interest in professional career in the marine industry. In 1990 Ted attended the Chapman School of Seamanship's Yacht and Small Craft Surveying Program. He and his wife started Stevens & Stevens Ltd. a marine survey business, in late 1990 after completing the course.

About the same time, Ted joined Society of Accredited Marine Surveyors as a Surveyor Associate (SA), a year and a half later he took and passed the SAMS Accredited Marine Surveyor test and was designated SAMS AMS #231. Mr. Charles V. Corder, the director of education of the Chapman Survey Course, asked Ted to develop the Chapman School Survey Disks which are a collection of word processing documents that make up the Chapman Survey Report Format. Shortly after that (late 92) Ted accepted an instructor's position at Chapman, teaching the propulsion segment he developed for the Yacht and Small Craft Surveying Program.

During the next two years Ted and various programmers developed the Force5 program. In early 1995 Ted was introduced to Tom Fryar, a young programming genius, who took on the task of re-writing the old version v.3.x and then finishing the totally new version v.6.0 in the summer of 96. Two very successful V6.x introductions followed soon after: October 1996 in San Francisco at the SAMS national symposium, and later at the 1997 (IBEX97) International Boat Building Exhibition at the Fort Lauderdale convention center.

The latest version seen here v.6.5x is still being evaluated and improved upon for later versions. The constant improvement to Force5 is mostly in response to suggestions from the ever-growing Force5 user base. "We listen and try to respond to our users." says Ted, and Tom is a leading edge type of programmer so we both enjoy adding great new features to our program.

In spite of the rather small vertical market of marine surveying, Tom and Ted are totally committed to future versions and are planning to implement some great new technologies like voice to text conversion and drag and drop (OLE) graphics for digital imaging.

In 1995 Ted's ongoing PC business forced him to quit the teaching job at Chapman and to stop surveying as well so he could devote more time to Force5 and take care of a fast growing network design, installation and support business.

One of the reasons that Ted says they are successful in publishing and supporting Force5 is his day-to-day experience in trouble shooting and supporting his network and stand alone PC clients. His clients range in size from small offices with one or two stand-alone computers to networks with more than fifty users.

Stevens & Stevens Ltd. Co. is an authorized Compaq reseller and service center, as well as a reseller for almost every other name brand of computer and accessory including authorized Hewlett Packard and IBM sales. He, his staff and associates hold several levels of certification credentials for Novell, and Windows network operating systems. "I stopped surveying early in 94 to dispel any misconceptions of organizational prejudice or conflict of interest, I gave up my SAMS AMS status in 95. Stevens & Stevens is proud to be a professional affiliate member of a fine marine surveying organization like SAMS. The officers and members of SAMS have been very kind to us over the past seven years and we appreciate it. I am looking forward to a like kind relationship with the members and officers of the other well respected organizations in the marine surveying industry."