Lorraine Escher is a Canadian writer and sailor. Since 2015 she has lived aboard SV Aphrodite, a St Francis 50 catamaran, homeschooling her four children while cruising the Caribbean, crossing the Pacific, and working her family toward a circumnavigation.
She writes Becoming a Sailor, a long-running blog about offshore family life, boat maintenance and refits, medical preparation, provisioning, and world travel.
A decade of offshore experience
Lorraine and her husband Rick bought SV Aphrodite in 2015 and moved their family of six aboard from Ottawa, Canada.
In the years since, the family has cruised the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, the wider Caribbean, transited the Panama Canal in 2018, and crossed the Pacific — reaching French Polynesia, Fiji, Vanuatu, and, most recently, Southeast Asia.
Throughout, Lorraine has homeschooled all four children aboard. She writes from direct, sustained experience of bluewater passages, hurricane-season preparation, boat systems and refits, and the logistics of raising a family at sea.
A writer by training
Lorraine holds an Honours Bachelor of English Literature from Carleton University (1996).
Before going to sea she spent a decade as a professional writer: as a Senior Technical and Marketing Writer at Nortel Networks (1996–2000), where she documented processes with product-training teams and travelled to Madrid and England to improve documentation delivery; and at Alcatel (2000–2005), writing technical documentation for network-management systems and coordinating content across a team of writers.
Earlier, with the Trantor Writing Group, she wrote an emergency-preparedness manual for the Canadian Red Cross. In 1995, Lorraine made a business cold call to one of Rick’s technology companies and worked on some of his user manuals while still in university. She had heard that he had cycled in South America but they didn’t actually meet until five years later.
She reflects on the shift from that editor-bound world to the unedited rush of blogging in Technical Writer Turned Cruiser.
Published articles
- Globe and Mail — “Wartime shaped Alfred Escher, he could fix anything and was no conformist” (January 2024)
- Caribbean Compass — “Hard-Working Kids: Keeping Us Afloat” (October 2017)
- All At Sea — “Family Cruising: The Joys of Choosing Crew” (December 2017)
- All At Sea — “Cruisers Gather at Dawn: Market Day in Port of Spain, Trinidad” (December 2017)
- Parrots magazine — “Canadian Parrot ‘Cycles’ the Pacific Coast” (Issue 88, May 2005)
Featured in the media
- SAIL Magazine — “MHS Cat People” (November 9, 2017)
- All At Sea / Fatty Goodlander — “The Crazy Reality of Tropical Storm Don in Grenada” (October 2017)
- CBC Radio — interview with Stu Mills (2016)
- CBC — “Everything Ship-Shape with Seafaring Ottawans in the Caribbean” (2016)
- CruiserTV — interview with Teena Clipston in Luperón (2016)
- CBC Radio — interview with Stu Mills (2015)
- CBC — “Ottawa family donates belongings to sail Caribbean” (2015)
Beyond the boat
Long before SV Aphrodite, Lorraine was an endurance cyclist and adventurer. She cycled 800 km solo across Brittany, France (1999); rode the Golden Triangle from Jasper to Radium to Banff (2000) and the Icefields Parkway from Jasper to Lake Louise (2001); backpacked to the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon via the Hermit and Tonto trails (2001); climbed via ferratas in Italy (2002); and cycled from Abbotsford, British Columbia, to San Diego (2002–2003) — a journey she wrote up for Parrots magazine.
Education
Honours Bachelor of English Literature, Carleton University (1996).