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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Bruce Van Sant: Unforgettable Lunch with a Cruising Legend
We invited celebrity sailor Bruce Van Sant and his wife, Rosa, to lunch aboard Aphrodite in Luperón. This is a fun blog post that really captures my early enthusiasm for learning to sail and for meeting the man who wrote the book on beating the path to windward.
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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.
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Another interview with CBC Reporter, Stu Mills (with audio)
A year after CBC’s Stu Mills first found us living in an Ottawa campground, I called him over Skype from our boat in Luperón for a follow-up segment that aired on Canada Day.
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La Isabela, Dominican Republic: Columbus Comes Alive
Christopher Columbus stepped off the page at La Isabela, Dominican Republic, where our family walked through his cliff-top house, the New World’s first church, and an old settlement’s cemetery.
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Cycling the Pacific Coast Highway — Camping with a Parrot
A nostalgic look back at the time Rick and I cycled 1,000 miles along the Pacific Coast Highway—with our chattering lory, Dixie, riding along.
