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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Card Game Illustration: A Boat Kid’s First Job at 10
At age 10, Karen illustrated “The Princess and the P’s”, a medieval-style card game by Emily Lindahl, drawing line art from Grenada for the box, cards, and video.
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Crossing the Panama Canal: A Different Cruising World
After seven years in the Caribbean, our family finally crossed the Panama Canal aboard SV Aphrodite. What we found on the Pacific side wasn’t just new geography — it was a different cruising culture altogether. Bigger tides, longer passages, fewer kid boats, and a whole new rhythm of life greeted us the moment we passed under the Bridge of the Americas.
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Saved! Anchor Retrieval: 2 Technical Divers, 1 Lift Bag (Poem)
“The Sea Was a Beastly Mistress” is an nautical poem that I wrote about how we lost and worked to retrieve a Mantus anchor near Racha Noi, Phuket — divers, lift bags, and lessons from the sea. It was written old-school, by clapping hands and counting beats, not by AI.
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Damn Chain! Losing an Anchor in Deep Water in Thailand
At Thailand’s Racha Noi: our anchor chain snapped, taking our 105-lb Mantus with it. From dinghy mishaps to community rescues in Chalong Bay, this story blends seamanship, technical lessons, and the camaraderie of people who step up to tackle challenges.
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Re-galvanizing Anchor Chain in Malaysia: Trust Broken
We get our anchor and chain regalvanized but all is not as it seems. That’s just the beginning of where things started to go wrong.
