Featured Content
From House to Sailboat: How a Family Road Trip Changed Us
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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Sailrite Ultrafeed LSZ-1: Our 7-Year-Old Gets Us Started
If you can’t handle a pillow case, what about our dinghy chaps? teased ten-year-old Paul as I faced our new Sailrite machine. My first goal was a single straight seam. My real goal is a whole lot more.
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Ditch Bag Contents: Preparing for a Pacific Crossing
How long could you actually survive adrift in a life raft? My late-night googling turned up coffee enemas, turtle-butchering tips, and a five-hundred-dollar shark magnet. Here’s what I’d really pack.
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Summer in Canada 2018: Back to Life on the Boat
Oh hello. It’s me. I’m back. Our family spent the summer in Canada. We were away from the boat, and away from boaty thoughts. While we were in Canada we drove a lot. We went to the Calgary Stampede. We saw snow, we walked on a glacier in the Rockies, we hit a moose with our vehicle, the house we planned to renovate burned. It was arson. A tent trailer became our temporary home. One night Henry rolled in bed and fell out of the tent trailer. One morning, we saw a black bear in our campsite. We spent time…
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Christian Missionaries in Haiti: Joy in a Concrete Church
We arrived by wooden boat in the heat and slipped into a Sunday service already in full swing—a swaying, clapping chorus of suits, lace and satin in a church in Ile a Vache, Haiti.
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Destination Île-à-Vache, Haiti: Voodoo, Fear and Fascination
Voodoo fascinated and unsettled me in equal measure. From my white, Canadian, catamaran-dwelling perspective in Ile a Vache, Haiti, here’s my story, with a cameo from our friend Vildo.
