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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Antigua Sailing Week – last day!
I’m sorry Antigua Sailing Week is ending. Our team ran the textbook arc of forming, storming, norming and performing, and around day two I was no demure observer, snapping we are in a race. I apologized later.
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Scopolamine Side Effects at Sea: My Blurry Vision Experience
Scopolamine side effects left me with blurred vision while sailing. Here’s what worked instead—from pressure bracelets, ginger, Dramamine, Meclizine to Sturgeron Forte.
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Antigua Sailing Week – a day to celebrate
Team Spirit of Juno is clicking, and today we placed second in our class. I’m finally feeling the pull of Antigua Sailing Week, and getting competitive, among people racing multi-million dollar yachts.
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Antigua Sailing Week – got myself a jib job
Still at Antigua Sailing Week, I’ve been promoted aboard Spirit of Juno from tailing the backstay to midships, where four of us grind the coffee-grinder winches to trim the jib. It feels like interval training.
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All the gear, give me a year
Learning to sail during Antigua Sailing Week is intimidating. I know a few lines by their colour, but why we sometimes winch, sometimes throw off, sometimes just ease, dear knows. Today I alarmed the skipper.
