INTRODUCTION

Before the Mast

W

e were held captive by the currents of the Strait of Gibraltar. Like a hamster spinning in its caged wheel, we were trapped, baffled, and not making any headway on the water. The Strait was infamous for these quick-changing and strong conditions—a phenomenon caused by its funnel-like geographical configuration. We had a decent wind, but our efforts were to no avail. Frustrated, we gave up at the end of the day after a good eight hours of basically treading water. Our refuge for the night was in the Spanish enclave port of Ceuta, across the water from the Port of Gibraltar which we were trying to leave. At least we had the illusion of having made progress, spending the night in a different place. The next morning brought success. We carefully gauged the changing currents as prescribed by our nautical book's precise instructions, and the Strait spat us out.

It was October 1982, and we were two months into our new life of sailing and living on a boat as a young family of four. We had sailed from our home port in Le Verdon, France, in August of that year, intending to travel until either the money ran out or something forced us to stop. When friends introduced us to friends, they often introduce us as the ones "who sailed around the world." While we have friends from that time in our life who did just that, we didn’t. We lived on Cowabunga for ten years, and it took us eight of those years to sail from France to California.

Before we began to sail, before I stood under the mast, and well before I had a husband or children, I had the itch to experience the world. My father told (and retold with age) unforgettable tales at the dinner table to my mom, younger brother, sister, and me. He spun stories of his experiences as a student in Switzerland and an ex-GI after WWII. His tales struck something deep within me, and I knew a seed of adventure had been planted. That's how it all started, and that's how I met my French husband, Michel, when I was a college student in France.

I desperately wanted to learn a foreign language with which I could ply a trade as a journalist. I was going to be Time magazine's next star foreign correspondent. I took advantage of the University of California at Berkeley's European Abroad Program (EAP) and began a year at the University of Bordeaux, France in the fall of 1974. Despite two years of college French, I was woefully inept at the language, and I felt terribly out of place my first several months in the country. Today, I realize that it was an excellent proving ground, daring me to move forward and conquer the unknown.

This is where my life veered from the blueprint I had set for my future. I met my kindred spirit and soul mate shortly after arriving in Bordeaux, which upset the whole apple cart. It didn't take long before I vacated the room I had rented in Bordeaux and moved in with him. He was in his last year at the School of Architecture, poised to pass his license exams. Michel was also an adventurous soul and shared my thirst for travel. Well before I met him, he had crisscrossed the entire United States by hitchhiking, from east to west, and north to south. When we met on campus, he had just returned from an internship with an architectural firm in Visalia, California.

After we had both finished school, we married in Newport Beach, California, and then settled in the Medoc wine region near Bordeaux for the next seven years. Michel established his own architecture office, and during this time a friend invited us on his boat to sail to Spain. It was an epiphanic moment for us, seduced by starting in one land and waking up in another. We were thrilled to have alighted in a new place through the magic of sailing. It was the hallmark event that changed our lives, in which we decided to pursue our deep desire to travel, seeking adventure via a sailboat.

We wanted to start a family eventually, but we didn't want our children to grow up in suburbia with the idea that the world stopped at their door. They could learn so much more through travel; the world would be their teacher. Thus, we decided to "retire" with our young ones for as long as we could while they were young and impressionable. Traveling on a sailboat seemed to be an ideal method of travel while raising kids and spending vital time with them in their early years. We had a vision and began planning for our ultimate goal of sailing around the world.

We found Cowabunga when we weren't looking. She practically fell into our laps. Michel met a sailor and mentioned to him off the cuff that we had the vague idea of maybe buying a boat. This person just happened to have a vessel we may be interested in.

Cowabunga was a sleek, forty-two-foot Rorqual "ketch" (or two-masted), built in France in 1968. It was a cold-molded wood boat, which means thin strips of wood planks were laminated together diagonally for several layers, creating a sturdy and watertight vessel. But for us, Cowabunga wasn't just a boat. She became our ticket, our liberty, our way of living, our identity, our survival. She changed our lives dramatically over those ten years.

"Cowabunga" was originally attributed to a character in a 1950s children's TV show. It is now commonly accepted as an exclamation of pure joy, or a yell of exhilaration. Surfers are said to have adopted the phrase in the 1960s to punctuate their delight and enthusiasm when catching the perfect wave. When I first met Michel, he enjoyed surfing. Although I'm not sure if he knew that word at the time, with his then-limited English, he was familiar with the surfing culture and eagerly adopted the idea. We couldn't think of a more perfect name than Cowabunga to christen our future home with, and to represent our absolute excitement when we found her. The name embodied our cry of joy and would come to signify our passion for travel, discovery, and adventure. She would not only be our home, she would be the vehicle for our new life and our passport to adventure. Then before we knew it, she became our identity. On the seas, among other cruisers and families like us, we were known as the Famille Cowabunga—the Cowabunga Family.

We moved on board in the summer as a trial run when our first child was only a year old. The experience went so well that we decided to stay on through the winter. We never moved back to land, and officially set sail from our home port of Le Verdon, France in 1982 with our two boys, Sean and Brendan, then three years and five months old. We didn't have unlimited funds, so we started out with a "we'll just see how far and how long we can go" mentality. We would stop on occasion and work when the opportunity arose. It wasn't always perfect, nor always a wonderful life in paradise. It was a lot of effort—lessons in survival a good portion of the time. But one year led into another, and before we knew it, it had been ten years.

We enjoyed the snug, homey confines of Cowabunga, and the exhilaration of conquering the challenges of propelling oneself with (or against) the elements of nature. Events happened along the way that changed our goals, our expectations, our reality. We were forced to learn how to "go with the flow" when our plans didn't always mesh with what life dealt us. No, we didn't make it around the world, but we were able to wrap the world around us.