Featured Content
Why We Want to Sail
We traded a conventional life in Ottawa for the dream of raising our children aboard a sailboat — even though I had never sailed.
About Our Boat
SV Aphrodite is a St. Francis 50 catamaran — Hull #1 of an award-winning bluewater design. See her specs, equipment, and offshore features.
Long Reads: Galapagos
Volcanoes, sharks, penguins, sea lions, offshore fishing fleets, and a message in a bottle — the Galapagos is one of the most interesting and diverse places we have visited during…
Long Reads Grenada
A muddy hike, memory-making at Grenada Carnival, drama on a public bus, sailing passages from Trinidad to Grenada and Grenada to Haiti, and what happened when COVID-19 arrived in a…
Why the Caribbean has virtually no tides
Why Caribbean tides are tiny — and why Panama’s beaches can vanish at high tide.
Luperón Long Reads — Boat Kids Go Local
Joining a local school taught entirely in Spanish, learning baseball, making friends, and discovering how quickly the Luperon cruising community can rally when help is needed.
Luperón Long Reads — Designing and Building a Mooring for Our 50-foot Catamaran
A technical long read about how we built a three-point hurricane mooring.
Luperón Long Reads — Waiting Out Hurricane Season
A gritty, funny, and affectionate look at Luperón, Dominican Republic — from stray dogs and bureaucratic red tape to unexpected kindness, cruiser culture, and lunch with Bruce Van Sant.
Bahamas Long Reads — Exumas Stories
Isolated anchorages, tidal creeks, swimming pigs, dock drama, cruiser life, and an encounter with a wild dolphin.
Southern Bahamas Long Reads — Beyond the Exumas
New to sailing, our family navigates shallow reef cuts, spots nurse sharks and wild flamingos, and visits remote island communities in the southern Bahamas.
Latest Blog Posts
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Two articles Published in All at Sea Magazine, December 2017
Two of my articles — Family Cruising: The Joys of Choosing Crew and Cruisers Gather at Dawn: Market Day in Port of Spain, Trinidad — appeared in the December 2017 issue of All At Sea Caribbean magazine, capturing family adventures and colorful Caribbean life.
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We are still living on the hard in Trinidad. It’s not all Christmas and poinsettias.
Propane valves failed on a Sunday, then the diesel fuel pump, then the generator’s heat exchanger. Living on the hard in Trinidad is not all Christmas and poinsettias, and Rick looks fit to spit.
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Living with Four Kids in a Boatyard in Trinidad — Turns Out, It Isn’t So Hard to Stay ‘On The Hard’
“I said no razor knives!”—Rick, setting boundaries with six-year-old Henry in a Chaguaramas boatyard. Fifty hours of scrubbing spilled oil later, living on the hard turns out not to be so hard.
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The Aftermath of an Oil Spill in Trinidad
The stench of fuel woke us in our beds in Chaguaramas—an oil spill some are calling a national disaster. By morning I’d already googled whether we could die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
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We’re in the Multihull Sailor magazine September 2017 issue. Our family looks downright glamorous!
Our family made it into Multihull Sailor magazine’s “Living the Dream”—and the hardest part was finding wifi strong enough to upload our photos, which we did at a posh Petit St Vincent hotel.
