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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Sailing terms revealed – internet helps the newbie sailor
The language of sailing is a foreign country for a newbie like me, where one gadget answers to bezel, protractor, compass and twiddly bit. Here’s how the internet helped me start decoding it.
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Hair cut and new glasses — ready for sailing!
I booked a fancy salon, the kind where you overhear gossip while getting hair extensions, then realized it clashed with my boat-shoe granola self. So I cut it short and got new glasses, ready to sail.
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Homeschooling: from sail boat to university
Report cards arrived and got me thinking. We want all four kids to reach university, and if we can’t make schooling work aboard, we’ll likely abandon cruising altogether. So I dusted off my old SMART goals.
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Cleaning house: regaining focus
Our house sits on five wooded acres, hidden from the street, a creek rippling alongside and the driveway teasing glimpses of stone gables before the trees break open. Now we’re cleaning it out, regaining focus.
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Cuts and repairs
I’m learning to sail through a Canadian winter while raising four kids solo, and this weekend brought a trip to the ER. Paul, six, split his chin on the hockey rink and earned three stitches.
