“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.

From the time of the tale of Adam and Eve, there is something about a forbidden fruit that makes it all that more enticing. Likewise, our curiosity was stoked about stories of sailing to Cuba, and the cruising experience on the other side of the divide.

If you sail long and often enough, you will likely experience a fair amount of the good with the bad. Those are the odds; no getting around it. We did indeed experience some mishaps and accidents. One of the more memorable ones comes to mind.