“Oh no,’ he said, coming into the cockpit. “I dropped a part that I needed in the water.” He was already striping off his navy blue t-shirt in that sexy way guys do when they bring it over their heads from the back of their shoulders. He was, as always, totally controlled. “Shit babe. Are […]

Days seven to fourteen.   “You want some of this?” the man asked me gently, when he saw me hobbling across the shelter on broken feet. He held out a silver flask with the words Congratulations Stephen etched under his thumb. He was tall, attractive, had shaggy, sandy blond hair, and a compassionate expression behind […]

Day 6   I woke up in the middle of the night with a bladder like an overfilled water balloon. I deliriously wrote in my notebook, ‘if walking is my Benadryl, then peeing is my cocaine.’ I had to pee so badly that it hurt. And though I knew I would not sleep again until […]

Day 5 I felt him stir beside me. I couldn’t not. I was on the higher side of the tent and, though I had tried my damnedest not to, most of the night, I had rolled into him and we were both at the lowest two feet.   He leaned up on his elbows and […]

Day 4 “YOU CALL YOUR WIFE??”   My eyes sprung open. No! Not again! FUCK YOU!!!   “I THINK I FORGOT TO TELL MINE I WAS COMING HERE!!” another man yelled back, sounding as surprised as the next guy about the whole business. One was on one side of us and one on the other. […]

DAY THREE I heard a person walking around the camp. His footsteps came closer as he stumbled around. I listened, wide eyed and immobile. I heard the unmistakable sound of him unzipping his pants. And then a stream against the tent. I pulled my legs into my body and away from that side of the […]

DAY TWO INTO THE FOG. A train barreled towards me. I couldn’t get off the tracks. I couldn’t move my legs. The conductor relentlessly blew the horn, but I was immobilized by fear. It was fifty feet away, then thirty, then ten. I tensed. I turned my body sideways and put my head in my […]

DAY ONE Somewhere in Illinois. . I pulled the mummy bag down so that only my face was exposed. Even having been tucked deeply into the bag, the tip of my nose was numb. “Remember when I forgot the tent poles and ruined the trip?” I said out loud into the air inside the van. […]

    Adam sailed us into a bay with a couple boats bobbing lightly on their anchors. He turned upwind and the momentum of the Talisman easily carried her parallel with a boat on either side. The head sail luffed lightly in the breeze and he pulled it in as I dropped the anchor to […]

  These past three years of exposure have been gripping, and bountiful; from the growth of my tribe, to the clarity of my mind, to the seduction of my adventurous and wanderlust heart. It has not always been easy. At times I have felt pulverizing loneliness, at other times extensive and exhaustive inadequacy. But I […]

A couple of days after Bill left, Adam followed. Within a day, I realized I wasn’t going to have reliable internet where we were anchored, outside the channel. A lonely prospect as I had spoken to only three or four people in the whole country and didn’t have cell service. So I woke up the […]

We had a friend over for dinner last night. A beautiful, pixie cut blond named Dawn who had contacted me through Instagram after seeing my pictures of Spanish Wells, where she had been planning to vacation. She got here a couple of weeks ago. She is a self proclaimed introvert but has befriended half the island. It […]

There has been some backlash for my writing of the shooting; mostly strong, beautiful women, protecting their Island. For this, I respect them. . After all the excitement I sat down. Within ten minutes I had the whole thing written out. I added every detail I could remember, even the seemingly unimportant ones. Then, I […]

I was finally on an island where I could just relax into things. Without boys who wanted to go, go, go all the time. The days were slow and I was reading a lot with tea in the cockpit. My favorite. I spent my days walking in endless discovery of the nooks and crannies of […]

We spent a couple nights at a terrible resort in Nassau called Atlantis. One couple told us they had sailed 100 miles out of their way just to avoid Nassau. And it was easy to see why. The island is ugly and incredibly industrial, everyone there trying to make a buck at the expense of […]

We anchored at Hoffman cay in a bay that seemed made for us. Other then one catamaran on the other side, that would leave early the next day, it was just us. The area was completely desolate. There were raw, uninhabited islands on every side. The boys jumped in and speared us a huge lobster. […]

For Adam’s Bahamian birthday I put a tea light on a stack of Pop-tarts. I went to bed the night before with grand plans of making a huge stack of pancakes with cute things written on them, only to realize that morning that I live on a boat with no pancake mix or flour. Already […]

It always amazes me how quickly everything can go wrong. One minute everything is fine and we’re pulling easily out of the slip, excited about finally leaving the comfort of Key West for the adventure of a lifetime that has to be sailing around the Caribbean, and then in a second the wind takes our […]

When you sail off into the sunset, it does not inoculate you from bad things. For me, early in February of 2016, in Key West, bad things happened.  Our beautiful boat cat had been getting more and more angsty every month since we got on the boat. He loved the marina in Minnesota where he […]

I went up to Key Largo to visit Milk and Chels, the gorgeous young newlyweds who originally lived next to us when we first got our boat (and they first got their boat) in Minnesota. We had all spent one truly remarkable summer falling in love with each other and with being on the water, […]

It has been said that sailing is 90% boredom and 10% terror. One day in early January, Adam and I were entertaining my mom and her husband in Key West. We were walking back to them, from moving their car, when a friend texted me and said, “there are boats in the channel by you, […]

“Who wants a Vodka cranberry?” Bill asked after leaving Cynthia’s. “I do,” Adam said as I raised my hand. We needed something to numb us a little after what we had seen. We went to the little open-all-night bar near the boat and poured ourselves and everyone in the place(the bartender and a couple guards) […]

Finally we were to have Cynthia all to ourselves for a whole day. We all piled in a tan and red ’52 Ford for a road trip to Vinales that felt like going back in time. There were no seat belts. The seats were bouncy bench seats. The windows were roll down windows with the handles long gone. […]

We were downtown and Adam spotted an Ice Cream store. While we were in line a Dutch girl with gigantic hair and a thick Dutch accent(reminding me of all the Queensdays lovingly spent in Amsterdam) heard us talking. “Americans?” She said as she licked the dripping ice cream from her fingers. “We are,” I answered, […]

We all woke up extremely hung over. The boys were worse off then even I was, having stayed out far later. I made them some coffee and we sat in the cockpit. We moaned collectively. Puddy jumped passed us (he knew he would be grabbed) and entered Cuba for the first time. I paused, seeing what he […]

After lunch at a wonderful open-air restaurant in Santa Fe with the best creamy lemonades ever and tiny birds in cages on the walls, we decided to walk all the way back to the marina. It was such a lovely day, if a little more sweaty then one would hope. We came upon a shop […]

We decided one morning we were going to take the bus no matter what. We asked a lot of people and walked around a good deal and finally ended up in a line with a bunch of Cubans waiting for the bus that would take us downtown for the peso equivalent of three cents as apposed to […]

In transmuting our raw experiences in Cuba into stories, I have changed some names and events in this or future posts about the country. I do so with respect to you, the reader, and to protect the people we found there, who otherwise could not have told us what they did. *** Customs was a […]

Lesson learned: Sleep is part of the preparation. While I’m used to odd hours and long shifts, the utter fatigue that sets in when the sailing gets lousy can be mentally and physically incapacitating; leading to poor decision making, procrastination of crucial tasks, even confusion that can lead to steering a wrong course or misinterpreting […]

“You think we should turn back?” he asked. I cocked my head to the side and met what I could see of his concerned eyes in the dark, over his hands, which tightly gripped the large metal steering wheel. His muscles were taut at the tops of his tanned arms and his body swayed harshly […]

  I have been afraid of sharks my whole life. Even in the pool when I was a little kid I remember being afraid if I could not see the entire pool at all times. Yes, I was afraid of sharks. In pools. I still get extremely nervous in the water if the visibility is […]

The thing people ask me most often is, “what do you do all day?” Everyone wants to hear the exciting tales of my grand adventure. So I thought I would give you a look into my last couple days. On my way back to Key West from Minnesota I had a scheduled 12 hour sit in Miami thanks […]

  We are anchored in Key West off of an island named Wisteria but called Christmas Tree. There is an ever changing community that lives on the island. We met our first islander the second day we were here when Bill was still with us. We were tooling around the anchorage in our dinghy when […]

Last night after the seas marginally calmed, Adam and I got have some romantic time as we snuggled in a blanket under the stars and let the boat drive us to the Keys. We have discovered how to balance the sails and the ship so that we barely have to touch the wheel. Even in […]

We set out at 10 in the morning for the Keys. There was a ton of wind but for some reason we couldn’t get our speed up. We must have been fighting some nasty currents. All day it was painfully slow progress and we could only go north or south because the wind was coming out […]

Bigger upside down D face then all roads leading to the litter box! Never wanting me to be devoid of something to write about the boys got picked up and cited by the national parks service today. The winds were remarkable high when we woke up, so high we couldn’t actually leave the Dry Tortuga’s […]

Free boat ride for three! We headed out at 3pm. Into perfect wind, it was a gorgeous day with palpable bursts of anticipation. We had 3 painful shots of various 99 proof fruit flavored vodkas to mark the occasion. Our little ship entertained 3 gorgeous dolphins not far out. A mom and twins. One of […]