Ok. Just a few small ideas (I'm no design expert myself).

Less white if you can. Viewing the home page and the forums index, its just that bit too bright really. If someone is a bit tired, maybe browsing the net after their days work - its simply going to hurt their eyes and they'll navigate away. I know its a pain in the ass, and theres over 100 different things you can tweak in the stylevars, but you need to do something. If you don't have the time to do it yourself, maybe consider installing one of the free themes on here for a while to take the pressure off yourself.

Next observation - content is definitely king. You need to get people posting somehow. As its a yacht based forum I'm guessing you probably have one yourself? Get some of your yachting buddies to sign up and post some threads. Promise them a beer or something for their effort.

Front page - try to make use of some of the widgets that are available to you. At the moment you have the calender and .... well, nothing else activated. If a spider does come across your site then there isn't a whole lot for it to index which means you'll never rank very high in the search engines. Maybe change the article layout a little too to make it even appear more populated - like having them displayed in the 1x2 pattern instead of just a single column.

Thank you Rob, I appreciate your input. All things I haven't thought of, being "in the forest" so to speak. Thanks for the advice!

I meant

Category Name
===>Forum
======>Sub Forum
===>Forum
======>Sub Forum


You get it?

No problem at all Chris

Good luck with it - and giz a shout if you're finding yourself in over your head :)

made changes that warrant a new look....still not "las vegas style" in the glitz and glamour...more like "topeka kansas on a friday night". making progress though.

Shyts cool.. but theirs not much to talk about on yats