Thirty days. That's all it took. That's how long it took. It's all kind of how you look at it. One month in a lifetime is a blip. One month in the middle of the ocean, with nothing but water in front of you, behind you, all around you can be a long time...yet it really wasn't.

There are legends on the high seas of finding buried treasures, bumping into lost or uncharted islands, and encounters with pirates. We haven't actually had these exact experiences yet we have encountered some interesting variations of these. One of the more peculiar ones comes to my mind.

Before it happened, yes, I was afraid. I would think about “what if.” What if it were to happen? What if we were at sea? Yes, the thought scared me. But kids also get hit by cars, simply running out into the street in front of their homes. So I couldn't worry about "what if." Then it did happen, but when it did I had no time to be afraid. I had to react—fast.

It’s a given that French men are difficult. Not only is my husband French, but he is also stubborn so I think I can safely say that he is a one-man “double whammy.”

I was looking forward to getting down farther to a more southern part of South America—so much mystique and so many legends from all the sailing lore we had read. It was late spring/early summer in Brazil and Argentina, November 1983, and we absolutely wanted to avoid any of the notorious bad weather that shoots up that way coming from Antarctica. This was a good time to go.

In a past life I lived and sailed on a sailboat for 10 years with my husband and our two young boys aboard Cowabunga, our 42-foot "ketch" (two masts). We first moved on board in 1980 and set sail from Bordeaux, France, in 1982, arriving in Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco, California, in 1990.