Someone else was on the line. "Your husband has had some sort of problem. It seems he had some kind of seizure and his heart stopped. He's in the ambulance right now on the way to the hospital." I was at the pay phone in the K-Mart parking lot. Sean and Brendan, 7 and 4 years old, were standing next to me. Michel was 37 and had just been resuscitated by paramedics from “sudden death.” I was dumbfounded.

It was an exercise in extreme frustration: 10 days of sailing 600 miles against the trade winds, making very little progress on a daily basis. Being in the equatorial latitudes, it was very hot and humid and no air could circulate inside the boat since we had to keep all the hatches closed tight.

“It has to be there,” my husband affirmed after taking another sun sight with the sextant. He had been taking sun sights almost non-stop since sunrise. A lot was at stake. “My calculations say we are here; I keep getting the same position. We have arrived.” Yet, from the deck we saw nothing. None of us saw anything. No land.

I heard a thud. I’m always the first one to hear a noise, or feel the change in the sway of the boat at anchor. I’m not good at sensing from what direction the wind is coming, but I do know when something is amiss. And the “thud” woke me up.

We soon discovered that once we were living and sailing full time on the boat, as opposed to our previous schizophrenic life of splitting daily routines between land-based occupations and weekend sailing outings, that our new life absolutely agreed with us. No, it wasn’t always pure bliss. In fact, it was a lot of work, but we were happy doing it.

There are certain times in life when one takes that big step—graduation, new job, quitting a job, getting married, having a baby—and there is no turning back. What’s done is done and things will never be the same. Such it was one warm summer afternoon, August 29, 1982, when we literally cast off the ties that bound us, slipped out to sea across the Bay of Biscay—the Golfe de Gascogne—in France, never to look back.

Cayenne, French Guiana, sits just above the equator around the latitude of 4° north, on the northern coast of South America. We were undeniably in Amazonian territory in this French outpost, just the other side of the Brazilian border. An unlikely settlement on the fringes of the jungle, Cayenne seemed to barely keep the wilds of the jungle at bay, with the dense green and humid tropical forest gobbling up the main road leading out of town just a mile or two outside the city limits. Here Amazonian watershed rivers and tributaries nourished a very vibrant equatorial jungle ecosystem.

Food in Cuba was rationed. Yet, we literally gorged and overdosed ourselves on lobster. We had so much that we even fed it to the cat. I canned it, made pizzas with it; I sought a hundred different ways to prepare lobster…we had to become creative. And it was all free! We couldn’t pay for it; they wouldn’t let us pay for it. Our money was flatly refused.