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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Boating in the 1970s: Navigation Was Simpler
Charting a course on a fictitious RYA map, I’m pulling my hair out and longing for the 1970s, when my family’s 14-foot aluminum boat navigated by the trusty “look-in-the-water” technique.
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Taking inventory of our sail boat
Rick is back from Fort Lauderdale after getting acquainted with Aphrodite, our St Francis 50, with plenty of expert help: our broker Pat Reischmann, and the former owner who knows these boats intimately.
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Outfitting a boat for the first time
Rick and former St Francis owner Dave were about to sail Aphrodite from Fort Lauderdale to Bradenton, and our new catamaran was utterly empty. Here’s the list for outfitting a boat from scratch.
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Transferring Boat Ownership: Why We Hired a Specialist
Buying a boat in Florida is starting to feel like our destination wedding: easy in the planning, complicated by distance. This is the case for hiring a marine documentation specialist to just get’er done.
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Sailing Poetry: Did John Donne Know More Than Coleridge?
The language of sailing carries its whole culture, and even in centuries-old poetry you can tell who manned the nav station and who sat munching a sandwich. I’d wager John Donne knew his way around a boat.
