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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Boat Chores for Kids: Learning Through Real Work
Rick thought fixing the heads was a fine job for Betty, 10, and Paul, 8; I fixated on the screws, the leaks, and the gross-out factor. Guess who was right about what boat kids can actually learn.
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Canadian Boat Kids Go Shopping for School Uniforms in Luperón
In a month our four kids, ages ten, eight, and five-year-old twins, start public school in Luperon, and none of us really speak Spanish. First stop: shopping for uniforms and hoping for the best.
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Sailing Life Culture Shock: Questioning the Dream
A year into cruising, my first real “Why am I doing this?” struck as I sat on the transom scrubbing a toilet with muriatic acid, homesick, catching the Tragically Hip’s farewell concert from far away.
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Our kids feature in a CruiserTV episode
We hosted Teena Clipston of CruiserTV aboard Aphrodite, and she filmed our kids for an episode called Cruising with Kids. It was a lot of fun, and here’s the result.
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The saga of Leo’s helm
An engine repair shop in Puerto Plata could be anywhere: same oily smell, same red parts. Only here it’s staffed by teenage apprentices, and I’ve come with single-handers Leo and Fabio to fix Leo’s helm.
