Welcome Aboard!

This website is our chance to share with friends, family, acquaintances, classmates, colleagues and others that are interested, our experience as we pack up our family of 6 and sail around the Atlantic and Mediterranean for a year. We hope we can give each of you a chance to share in our adventure. There will undoubtedly be many trials and tribulations along the way but also amazing things to be seen. I am by no means a linguist and just starting to figure out website development, so bare with me! Feel free to send me comments or questions about things you want to see more of or want to learn more about. I hope that each of the kids can also post their thoughts and experiences at times so you can have their perspective on things.

At this time, we are 2 months out from the start of our trip. So far, the trip has been 9 months in the making. Apparently this is a relatively short period of time to get prepared for a trip of this magnitude and the time has already flown by. Two months hardly feels like enough time to get the last things in place.

Our decision to come on this trip is based on a dream that Kevin has had since he was a teenager. He read a story in National Geographic Magazine of a 17 year old boy sailing around the world by himself and was hooked on the idea of a sailing adventure. He mentioned this to me before we got married and I am generally keen to be a part of the adventures he plans because it makes life exciting! When we were newly married, between work and medical school, we learned to sail (in the Florida keys!) and bought our first sailboat. We had small trips around Vancouver Island until after Halyna was born. Then we found it was difficult to sail with the little children and our lives got too hectic. So we sold our boat. The dream seemed far away for several years as we added more children and more work to our lives. But then, last year, Owen questioned us as to why we would let our dream go. We couldn’t let our son shame us! Plus all the kids were now the perfect age. Owen is just about to head into high school, and all that comes with planning for university, and the little kids finally know how to at least float in the water! So, once I secured a way to have my practice covered (thank you to my locum!), we started to make Kevin’s dream a reality.