It started to rain, and then it didn't stop. It was biblical, 40 days and 40 nights—or at least it seemed that long. When it literally rains every day for a month straight, what's another 10 days or so—give or take? To top things off, being cooped up in a 42 ft. long, 10 ft. wide cocoon, with a 4 year-old and an 18 month-old rendered the time long, very long.

We knew them as “Guapo,” and they swept us off our feet. Sometimes a happenstance encounter leads to the most amazing outcomes, and such was our experience upon meeting the Schurmanns, a Brazilian family on the sailboat Guapo.

We were held captive by the currents of the Strait of Gibraltar. Like a hamster just spinning in its caged wheel, we were trapped, not making any headway. The Strait was infamous for this. Finally, at the end of the day after a good eight hours of basically treading water, the "Rock" was still grandly displayed before us across the horizon just as it was when we left the harbor earlier that morning. We gave up and hiked across the water to the isolated Spanish enclave port of Ceuta, bordering Morocco on the North African coast.

It was an anomaly. There it leaned, the ramshackle shack on an exclusive shoreline in the midst of an upper class, somewhat secluded tropical enclave. It was just two doors up from the pointy southern tip of Merritt Island—land's end—in Central Florida. With just a narrow bridge over the Banana River separating it from the town of Indian Harbour Beach, the area was a bedroom community for Cape Canaveral, Cocoa Beach, and the long reach of NASA at the Kennedy Space Center. It is called, in fact, the Space Coast. We slipped in the back door on the water amidst this reputable decor, and the shack became our "hippie commune" home for two itinerant cruising families for a little over three years. At first, the neighbors were not amused.

Of the many things we learned from our life on the water, one of the the most notable was that the cruising community is a small and cohesive group. We would often run into boats, families, and cruisers whom we had met at an earlier time and place, later again (even years) in other ports and countries along the way. We learned that just because one crosses an ocean doesn't necessarily mean that a past stays behind.

Rio! Rio de Janeiro! We arrived. We did it! We crossed an ocean, we crossed the equator, we changed hemispheres. We landed on a new continent, in another culture, in another world. We were incredulous; we were jubilant!

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.

Christopher 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...