One of the many lessons we learned while sailing—or at least one that Neptune actively tried to teach us—was patience. Patience when the wind wasn't there, patience when all hell broke loose, patience when the rain wouldn't let up, patience when everything broke, patience when waiting for parts, patience with customs and immigration formalities.
Read MoreChristopher Columbus and Che Guevara were unlikely characters with whom to share our story, yet their ghosts seemed to ironically weave in and out among us on several occasions during our travels. In fact it became a family joke. We would alight in certain places and there would be a monument here, a marker there...
Read More15,000 feet high. I wasn't feeling well. Neither was Sean and he promptly threw up. We were in the Andes, in Venezuela, and for us—having spent all our life at sea level—ramping up to this altitude in just a few short hours apparently didn't set very well with two of us. Michel and Brendan didn't seem to be suffering as much from the effects. We had just disembarked from what was touted as the world's highest and largest cable car in world, ready to set out on a daylong hike.
Read MoreNovember 1989, and Panama was not a safe place for Americans. We arrived in the canal zone just a little over a month before the December 20, 1989 Invasion of Panama ordered by President George H. W. Bush. Antagonistic diplomatic maneuvers were jockeying around, quickly escalating emotions and tensions to a point of no return.
Read MoreOne day he was simply a sailor, a cruiser, a "sail bum," worried about rigging, sail, andengine repairs. Then in what seemed like a blink of an eye, he was working for NASA. Just like that.
Read MoreThe afternoons belonged to them. They were one grand wet, rambunctious, laughing, amoeba of towheads, redheads, arms and legs; cackling in a variety of accented English, French, and Spanish, swimming and jumping helter-skelter. These were the itinerant children of the anchorage, all glued together for this brief period, sudden fast friends in an unlikely paradise, with nothing to do but have fun!
Read More"Life is what happens while you are making other plans" the adage goes. I believe there is much truth to this. Indeed, many of our travels, mishaps, and adventures happened in this vein: hiccups in our master plan, a curve in the road, a fly in the ointment. Consequently our plans would change, sometimes drastically. It was in such a framework that we unexpectedly discovered and lingered on the delightful island of Curaçao, one of the "ABCs" (Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao) in the Dutch Antilles—thanks to a sudden whim.
Read MoreWell, maybe we had more than 15 minutes of fame. In October 1989, the journalist Gregory Jaynes who wrote the Time Magazine feature on us, wrote a follow-up article for Life Magazine. He traveled to the island of Curaçao and visited with us for a few days.
Read MoreIn March 1987, just a few weeks before Michel's brush with sudden death, we were featured in Time Magazine.
Read MoreJanis Couvreux is an author, journalist and blogger. Her most recent work is the memoir: "Sail Cowabunga! A Family's Ten Years at Sea."
Find Janis on social media or around the web.
Sail Cowabunga! A Family's Ten Years at Sea, Janis Couvreux is a journalist, sailor, mom, grandmom, traveler, and Franco-American, who has blogged at the Huffington Post about living bilingually, crossing oceans, backpacking adventures, and raising kids outside the box.
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