15,000 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.

November 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.

One 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.

The 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!

It was hot, really hot. Buenos Aires at the apex of its summer season. Thousands upon thousands of people were giddy, milling around, waiting anxiously in the Plaza de Mayo—the central hub and heart of this very cosmopolitan and European city.

Well, 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.

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.