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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Crossing the Gulf Stream: Our First Passage to the Bahamas
Tomorrow at 6am we leave the Florida Keys for our very first passage aboard Aphrodite—about eight hours across to Cat Cay in the Bimini Islands, Bahamas. The kids are thrilled and so are we.
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Tornado watch In Florida
A tornado watch in Florida means empty water and a bobbing anchor. Four-year-old Karen wanted to know if that anchor was truly jammed in the ground, while the boys buried themselves in the iPad.
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Boat batteries have arrived!
Six army-green Victron batteries, 130 pounds each, just arrived, the very last item on our endless refit list. Installed, they mean freedom from running the generator under Betty’s bed, and the Bahamas at last.
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Battery testing and replacing
Still stuck in Florida, still not the Bahamas. While we wait on waylaid UPS packages, Rick dove into our struggling batteries and our nightly reliance on the generator to stay charged at anchor.
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First Sailing Passage: Fear, Seasickness and Bahamas Plans
UPS delayed our spare parts, so we can’t leave for the Bahamas on New Year’s Day. Rick was crushed; I mustered all the empathy I could—which, provisioned below our waterline, was admittedly a stretch.
