What’s next
- We’ve just left the Maldives but we’ve spent the last few months:
- seeing the Formula 1 in Singapore
- doing boat work in Malaysia
- provisioning in Thailand
- spending the next generation’s inheiritance on spare parts
- The Maldives are halfway across the Indian Ocean and from here, we’re on to Socotra (Yemenis island off the coast of Somalia), then Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan, then Egypt to transit the Suez Canal and land in Crete around April 2026
- total sailing ~42 days at ~5knots
- 5131 nautical miles
- fueled with 8 kilos of coffee
But first some background…
How it started
My analog highlight reel while growing up is represented by the magazine National Geographic. My dad never missed an issue. It had great photography and great writing about wild animals and far away places. My dad worked for Air Canada so we had free airfare, and when not working, he was planning a trip…or he might be building a sailboat in our yard, or building a darkroom in our basement, or building a cottage on land he and mom bought for $500. My dad’s adventurous spirit would charitably be dubbed an ADHD trait today.
When I was little, he taught me to tie a bowline knot. This is an essential knot every kid should know, he said, because if you fall in a well, someone can throw you a line to haul you out. He taught me to tie the bowline around my waist with one hand in case I fell into this well and broke an arm. It was this kind of important info he taught me even though I might have been only six at the time.
Sailing on Lake Huron, he also showed me how to avoid getting tangled in the mainsail’s sheet by holding it taut, looped over my thumb. I believe that was the same time he knocked me overboard to make sure my lifejacket would right me. I might have been eight then.
At 14, he gave me one of his cameras, a Pentax Spotmatic that I travelled with for the next decade through South America, Europe, and Asia. One of these trips was with him by train–across Russia, Mongolia and China.
My dad instilled in me a ton of good transferable wisdom that I’ve applied multiple times for this trip, the kind of ABCs you can fall back on when you’re overwhelmed, tired, or distracted:
- for spares, one is none, two is one
- a Plan B is part of your plan
- the best camera is the one in your hand
- and sometimes ya gotta just say Leap and the net will appear
So it’s been a good match doing this trip with someone such as Ian who can puzzle out a bucolic watermaker with leftover parts, who has multiple contingency routes for weather and shite anchorages, who enthusiastically supports all my photography purchases, and who auspiciously shares a birthday with my dad.
How’s going
A dozen times a day, I still talk myself through a bowline the way my dad taught me, “The bunny comes up the hole, around the tree and back down the hole.” I still go through my camera exposure checklist, systematically, the way he taught me. Over the course of this circumnavigation, we’d talk on the phone, he’d ask about where we were and look it up in his “Nat G” Atlas. He’d ask what part of the boat was giving us the most headache. If everything was working well, he’d ask how the teak was, because he is excellent at refinishing teak and he always said he could come anytime to help. At 97, he renewed his passport, paying the extra amount so it’d be good for 10 more years.
The other day, I was thinking of him when I was under the boat scraping the barnacles off the hull–it involves completely immersing yourself in a swirl of green fuzy sludge and the job is, as my dad would say, good exercise. When I called this time, my sister had been keeping vigil with my mom. He had declined suddenly, a few weeks after his 100th birthday. In the past few days, he had taken to bed. This was all a bit shocking as he has been, all his life, relatively indestructable.
When I called, he couldn’t talk but we worked out some sign language. He squeezed my mom’s hand indicating that he could hear me. I said I thought he might be romanticizing all this sailing bullshit but would he like to be here cleaning barnacles off the hull with me? He squeezed my mom’s hand “yes”. Of course he would.
A few days later, he passed away peacefully at home holding her hand. They were married 76 years.
Sailing Afrikii 
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