We all know what a dysfunctional family looks like. Most of us come from one. In my college psychology textbook, the composite dysfunctional family looks like this: the dad (or mom) is an alcoholic, the mom (or dad) tries to hide it and becomes co-dependent, the oldest child tries heroically to compensate for the parents’ weaknesses and becomes neurotic as a result, the middle child rebels or runs away and becomes the black sheep, and the youngest child tries to win affection by becoming the family jester. Sound familiar? Problems in this family are not resolved but are hidden, avoided, passed off and/or fought loudly about. The parents’ baggage is handed dutifully over to the children, so they can carry it guiltily into their own marriages and families, merging it with the baggage of a spouse, and passing the combined load onto the children, and so forth and so on, time without end.

But what is the alternative? What is a functional family? Maybe it’s so rare or so boring the psychology textbook didn’t see the need to illustrate it, or maybe I didn’t identify with it and can’t remember. One of the reasons we unplugged from the “regular” life was because we don’t like the way our culture defines and undermines the family unit. It’s “normal” for parents to be running busily on separate hamster wheels, growing apart until they can no longer stay married, then spinning off as singles, or re-pairing to repeat the cycle. Kids are often collateral damage, dropped off for most of their childhoods at overcrowded day-care centers, government schools, friends’ houses, and sports practice where they’re forced to find their own way while their parents try to earn a living and pick up the pieces. I pass no judgment—forging a healthy family in our time and place is near-impossible and it requires a superhuman (or even supernatural) effort to change the familial patterns established from childhood.

I do not discount the ability of love to overcome these challenges, and the desire of all parents everywhere to do what’s best for their children, but merely propose that the norm is dysfunction. Jay and I are incredibly grateful to our parents, who, despite their own difficult childhoods, raised us to the best of their abilities, helping to give us the confidence and discipline we needed to pursue the lifestyle we’ve chosen. Even so, our childhoods were relatively “normal” and we went to public schools and followed the proscribed path until we found ourselves in the suburbs living “the American Dream” (complete with its hamster wheels) and wondered, “Is this it?”

One of the books that inspired us to leave our normal life and try something new was Tom Neale’s All In the Same Boat, in which he states some of the reasons he took his family cruising on a sailboat:

We do it because it’s fun. We do it because it’s beautiful. We do it because we love nature and the sea and the winds and the sky. We do it because it allows us to raise a family the way a family should be raised—and to know our children. We do it because it gives us more control over the way our family lives and survives, over the education and nurturing of our children, over the air we breathe. It gives us more control over our lives…

We didn’t even know what that meant when we started out. Seven years later, we are still figuring it out. What we know is this: despite some bad habits we carried with us from previous generations, we have a functional family. It is, by no means, a well-oiled machine, but it does function. When there is a problem or a conflict, and there are many, we don’t drown it in alcohol, we don’t run away from it, we don’t fight loudly about it, and we don’t ignore it or try to hide it. We have “family meetings” and when bad things happen, we pull together. Jay and I do marriage maintenance, and we try to spend individual time with each of the kids. By God’s grace, we do the hard work of loving each other in a small space. And it is hard work—there are fights, hurt feelings, harsh words, a constant need for conflict resolution skills and forgiveness. But there are also fun times: excellent dinner discussions over good food, games, music, and laughter. Sometimes I feel like we are failing to love each other adequately, but when I take a step back and look at the big picture or someone gives me an outsider’s perspective, I recognize that even in our struggles, we are a functional family, and that is one of the best gifts of a cruising lifestyle.

I’m married to an incredibly conscientious, hard-working man. When we sailed up the East coast last year, he flew to clients from every coastal city at which we stopped. He took conference calls while we motored up the Potomac. He worked while I took kids to the sights in our nation’s capital.  When we went skiing in February, he worked in the cozy comfort of the condo while we braved the elements and played in the snow.

Don’t get me wrong, the man does know how to have fun. It’s just hard to get him out of his zone. He never takes a sick day, works on vacation, and rarely turns down work.  I appreciate this work ethic (it enables me to stay home with the kids, after all), but how do you get this poor man to take a break?

1. Guilt. Ask him questions like, “If you were on your death bed, would you say, ‘Too bad I didn’t work more’ or ‘Too bad I never took my kids out to Dry Tortugas National Park when I had the chance’?”

2. Take away his internet. Nothing like a remote location with no cell phone service and no internet to make a man look up from his computer and notice the natural world and play with his kids.

3. Clean water and cool sea creatures. Since being spoiled by Bahamian gin-clear water, the man cannot enjoy the water. Swimming pools? Yuck. Keys beaches? No way. But take him out where the water is clean and turquoise and filled with fish, and he’ll grab his fins and mask and new Go Pro and away he goes. I can’t keep up with him, and that’s saying something.

4. Make a commitment. Jay is a man of his word; if he makes a promise, he keeps it. In fact, if I make a promise, he keeps it. I invited our friends Ken and Amy and their three kids to go cruising with us to the Dry Tortugas, fully expecting them to find some reason they couldn’t do it, and to my surprise, they accepted! Do the math: that would be our family of 7 + their family of 5 on a boat with 4 cabins for 7 days 70 miles from civilization. As it turned out, we took their oldest two kids, Max and Mia, on the overnight passage to Garden Key, and Amy and Kai met us on day four by ferry. Ken missed out on the trip entirely because the ferry was full and he had to get back to work. We returned on day seven with four extra passengers—tired, but happy. Everyone got along and we were able to share a cool experience with good friends who might not otherwise have experienced the park in that way.

5. Remind him what the boat is for. We did not buy Take Two to sit at a dock. We recognize that it takes a lot of work to keep her in good condition, and a lot of money. With only one of us bringing home the bacon, it’s hard to break away. But occasionally, we have to stop what we’re doing and get the boat out so we can enjoy all the things for which we work so hard. All work and no play makes Jay a very dull boy.

Why is leaving so hard? We have asked this question countless times over the years, and the blog archives are probably littered with posts about departure angst. We like traveling, we don’t mind island hopping, or even making long passages, but for some reason picking a time for departure and actually untying the lines is very stressful. It could be that every time we try to leave, something goes wrong.

Once, one of our kids swallowed a sprite-can pop-top right before a Bahamas trip, delaying us for a few days while we waited to see if we were going to have to spend some time at Miami Children’s Hospital (we didn’t). Another time, we anchored out ahead of a Thanksgiving buddy-boat trip with Jay’s folks and we lost half a battery bank, and a generator breaker switch got turned off accidentally and the remaining batteries weren’t charging. After Rachel was born, we tried to leave the dock ahead of a tropical storm and missed the window to head south, so we pulled into a mangrove-lined bay we knew of and weathered five days of 30-40 knot winds before we could actually leave. One year, we left for the Bahamas, got out the inlet and the water was so rough that we decided to turn around and wait another week at anchor until we felt up to trying again.

And here we are, tied to the dock in Ft. Pierce, with other places and other people beckoning, and we just can’t seem to untie the boat. We’ve had at least three farewell dinners and someone sent us a good-bye key lime pie. At the beginning of last week, we had all but decided to hop over the Gulf Stream when we checked the kids’ passports and realized that four of them had expired in April. Oops! Guess we won’t be traveling internationally for 4-6 weeks!

Some people make it seem so effortless—they circle a date on the calendar, fuel and provision the boat, rise before the sun and untie the lines, sailing away without fanfare or failure. For us, all the stars must be exactly aligned: no sick kids, no storms, no emergencies with Jay’s work, no unfinished boat projects, and no extended-family crises. We want wind from the right direction, calm seas, and a traveling moon. I guess it’s a miracle we ever leave the dock at all.

But then it happens: one morning, after months of discussion and planning, after we’ve all but given up trying to leave, we wake up, feel the freshening breeze, have our coffee while we take a look at the charts, grab a few last-minute items at the store, and start the engines. Without a soul to wave to, we pull in our power cord and dock lines and motor slowly away. Somehow we know when the right moment comes, but rarely do we know beforehand. If you ask me when we are leaving, or where we are going, I respond, “Who knows?” I am not merely being mysterious—I really have no idea. There is a Plan, but it isn’t ours and we’re not informed until we’re well on our way. This kind of spontaneity makes scheduling a bit tricky, but it keeps us humble and provides us with many pleasant surprises.

We’ve owned Take Two for seven years now. She’s been our home for nearly six. That’s longer than I’ve ever lived in any house, anywhere. It’s long enough for the initial romance to have worn off, but not so long that I am tired of living aboard. Living on a boat seems to possess the perfect balance of familiar and foreign. Sometimes, our life is exciting—we meet new people, we go to new places, have adventures. And sometimes it’s humdrum, especially if we’re tied to a dock because of boat projects or Jay’s work. Somehow, over the course of several years, both the extraordinary and the mundane have woven themselves into some kind of “normal” for us.

One reason I think we have been successful living aboard is that we try to balance working on the boat with enjoying the boat. The to-do list for a boat is not linear, but circular. As soon as you’ve fixed one thing, another needs fixing, and if, by some miracle, everything has been fixed once, then it’ll be time to go back and fix it all again. If you accept that you’ll never be finished, it frees you up to just pick a stopping spot and leave for a while. This would not be possible if the boat represented a sabbatical from our normal lives, but since it is our normal life, we’ve found a way to compromise. We use the boat, bring it back to a dock to work on it, and then make some more money so we can use the boat again.

People frequently ask our kids “what is it like to live on a boat?” They think they’ll receive some amazing response about adventure and fun and an unconventional life, but our kids either look at them blankly or, worse, tell them how they always get seasick. For children, “normal” is defined by the adults in their lives. Rachel, who has never lived in a house, thinks a bathtub is exotic, and looks forward to going to her Mimi’s house because she can take a bubble bath there. For boat kids, taking the dinghy to get groceries is normal, using laundromats is normal, going to the beach for recess is normal, seeing dolphins and manatees in the “yard” is normal. Without the perspective of time and experience, they won’t be able to appreciate their upbringing on the water.

For Jay and me, leaving suburbia was anything but normal—some people said we were “crazy” and by that, a few even meant “foolish.” But the way our culture defines “normal” was not attractive to us: we didn’t like the norms of indebtedness, rush-hour traffic, school schedules, mowing the lawn, and saving for retirement. If that’s your cup of tea, have at it, but we longed for something else. I am always being asked, “How do you do it?” It’s a question that has many possible answers, but the most boring one is that I get up in the morning and put my pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else. It’s normal for me to homeschool five children on a boat. I appreciate that it’s an interesting way to live, and that we’re different even from a lot of the families we meet cruising, but, honestly, the excitement has worn off and we’ve settled into the business of raising our family, working, fixing our boat, and going exploring. That said, I love our life and love being able to change the scenery without packing any boxes and renting a U-Haul.

A big part of our life aboard involves learning to be self-sufficient. We make our own power and water. We carry tools for fixing engines, sewing canvas, grinding grain, and catching fish. We do school at home, work at home, and travel at home. We make things from scratch. But one thing we don’t do well is grow our own food. While we can eat fish (assuming we can catch them), having a garden or raising livestock isn’t really possible. Despite the limited deck space, we’ve tried a few gardening experiments. Sarah has the most interest in growing things and has made several attempts—one year she grew carrots and an aloe in pots on deck, and another year, she gave me a window-sill herb garden for my galley. These efforts have not been entirely successful. The pots on deck don’t appear to appreciate the Florida heat or salt spray. The windowsill herbs end up over- or under-watered. We’ve spent lots of money at garden centers with very little to show for it.

This spring, we decided to give it one more try and bought an Earthbox. It’s reputed to be a fool-proof way to grow a lot of produce in a very small space. It has a special reservoir for watering from the bottom, but it drains well, so it’s supposed to be self-watering. It came as a kit, with calcium carbonate to condition the soil and a year’s supply of fertilizer to feed the plants. It has a reflective plastic cover to keep heat (and salt) out and moisture in. Basically, you set it up and it takes care of itself. Since we like to use fresh herbs, we started with an herb garden, growing, like the song lyrics: parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. While we couldn’t hope to feed 7 people out of one Earthbox, if the current experiment is successful, we could get additional boxes to grow things like tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, and salad greens to supplement our trips to the grocery store and farmer’s market. Even if the attempt is ultimately unfruitful, we will have helped a kid to pursue a worthwhile hobby and enjoyed the effort. Better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all.

Recipe: Meatloaf with Fresh Herbs
Prep time: 1 1/2 hours Makes: 2 loaves (1 1/2 lbs.)

1 pound ground turkey (pastured is best)
2 pounds grass-fed ground beef
2 eggs
1 cup bread crumbs
1 small onion, finely chopped
3 cloves fresh garlic, peeled and minced
2 teaspoons fresh chives, minced
2 teaspoons fresh parsley, minced
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves
2 teaspoons rosemary leaves, minced
2 teaspoons fresh sage, minced
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons deli mustard with horseradish
2 tablespoons organic ketchup

Combine all ingredients and mix well, using hands to knead until you have a consistent texture. Divide into two loaves and bake at 350° for one hour or until internal temperature reads 160°. Slice and serve with ketchup.

Going to a boat show was an important part of our lives when we were dreaming of sailing away. Before we bought Take Two, I remember driving with Jay and his dad across Alligator Alley to the Miami Boat Show and carrying 9-month-old Sarah (now nearly eleven) in the baby backpack. I crawled on and off boats all day, went to inspiring seminars, talked to authors and bought their books, and looked longingly at all the vendors’ booths, selling things we would need “someday,” the names of which were part of a mysterious and romantic lexicon: foul weather gear, roller furlers, gensets, spinnaker snuffers, snatch-blocks, and drogues. These words have lost their luster through common use, and I recently discovered that the boat show holds no more magic for me.

We drove to Miami for the Strictly Sail part of the Boat Show last weekend and found the whole experience to be a bit disappointing. Aside from the purchase (at those fabulous boat show prices!) of a WinchRite, to make winching a cinch, and a few conversations with vendors like Winslow about re-certifying our life raft and Force 10 about what an oven replacement might look like, the whole show had a been-there-done-that feel to it. Jay was able to talk to several sailmakers about what kind of reaching sail we need to have made and whether it needs a sock or a furler on a bowsprit, but he could easily have done that without the family tagging along. The kids, who used to look forward to a Boat Show like the circus coming to town, looked extremely bored, surrounded by booths full of sailing gear as familiar to them as a toothbrush or a spoon. The highlight of the day, actually, was having a nice lunch out with “Skipper” (Jay’s dad), who had driven over to talk to the Moorings Company about their boat, which comes out of charter this year.

Sitting in Liza Copeland’s “Cruising in the Caribbean” seminar, I had an epiphany: I should be standing up front instead of sitting in back. I’m not boasting when I say I have now achieved “expert” status in areas like: Provisioning for the Bahamas, Organizing and Stowing Gear on Your Boat, Taking Small Children Cruising, Transitioning from Land-lubber to Full-time Live-aboard, Making Offshore Passages with a Family, Boat-Schooling, and What it Means to be a Good First Mate. There are plenty of things about which I have a lot left to learn, and Liza’s talk and slide show helped psyche me and the kids up for what is likely to be our next big adventure, but on the whole, we are in a different place than we were the last time we went to a boat show. We are, in effect, the people we used to look up to.

After lunch, we ran into some friends we met in the mooring field in Boot Key Harbor last year. Christina reminds me of myself not so long ago—pushing a toddler in a stroller out in front of her pregnant belly. I know what she feels like, at the beginning of the journey, still trying to figure out what raising a family on the water will look like, not sure how to proceed, but willing to take a shot at an unconventional life. The boat show crowd is full of retirees and childless couples with time and money to pursue their sailing dreams, but I feel excited when I see young families there with children in tow, hoping to break free.

While I have not lost my nostalgia for past boat shows that served to inspire us and help us reach our goals, and for the people we met there who have become close friends, I recognize that going back was a mistake. What we need to boost us into new adventures will not be found inside a tent, so perhaps going back for us should mean giving back—thinking seriously of what we could do to inspire more families to get out there and do it.

Heavy seas
A wave breaks
Sending shards of broken water
Onto the decks
Scattering early morning light
And leaving a rainbow of mist
Where the wave used to be

In the trough
A valley forms between two emerald hills
The fleecy foam like sheep
Dotting the smooth hillside

At the peak
A mountain landscape opens up
Snowy summits as far as the eye can see
Treeless and stark as the top of the world

A slide to the bottom
A thrill ride, a wind-made ski slope
The roar and rush fill my ears
And overflow into the other senses:
I see the roar, smell the rush, taste the crash

To my right
The next wave builds
In its translucence,
I see a sudden shape, a silhouette—
A lithe, sleek body, curved back, tapered tail
A fin breaks the surface
A submarine skier
Slides down the slope, leaps into the next,
And circles back around to take
Another sweet run
Like a ram on the Matterhorn,
The dolphin is at home in these mountainous waves

A wave breaks—
An alien in this liquid landscape,
A mere visitor from terra firma,
I’m transfixed and mesmerized—
My fear dissipates like the spray

No trip into the Chesapeake would be complete without a stop in the York River. Easily accessible and picturesque, Yorktown is a perfect place to start a history field trip. We did a 2½-day passage from Charleston and stayed a few days at the York River Yacht Haven, directly across the river from historic Yorktown. The marina has a good restaurant, swimming pool and very nice ship’s store, and is only a ten-minute dinghy ride away from Riverwalk Landing where you can dock your dinghy for $5/day and either walk around town or ride the free shuttle to see the sights.

Yorktown is one corner of the so-called “Historic Triangle,” connected by the beautiful Colonial Parkway to Colonial Williamsburg and the historic Jamestown Settlement. There are so many things to see and do in this area that it would be easy to get sucked into the triangle—we spent a few days in Yorktown alone, then rented a car to take the children to Jamestown Settlement (not to be confused with the National Park, Historic Jamestowne, that sits on the actual site of the 1609 settlement). We went to Colonial Williamsburg later, at the tail end of our trip, while waiting in Hampton, Virginia for good traveling weather. One recommendation I would make for visitors headed this way: figure out what you’d like to do ahead of time and buy combination tickets.

In Yorktown, there are three must-see stops: the Yorktown Victory Center, a museum and living history park, Historic Main Street, capped at its eastern end by the eye-catching Yorktown Victory Monument, and the Yorktown Battlefield (a National Park and the scene of the pivotal battle in the Revolutionary War). There was something very special about seeing Revolutionary War cannons in place on fortifications that were built so long ago. We had lunch one day on the waterfront at “The Carrot Tree,” a local favorite, and walked across the street to the Ben & Jerry’s for cool treats.

Jamestown Settlement has changed a bit since I was there as a kid. The outdoor sites, the Indian Village, Fort and three historic ships at the Riverfront are just as I remembered them, peopled with guides in period-dress who answer questions and explain life as it once was. But the new indoor museum exhibits almost dwarf the exterior living history ones. The enormous, air-conditioned building tells the whole story of Jamestown, from its days as a private business venture to its role in the American Revolution, with more artifacts and information than one could take in in a single perusal. I was very happy we took the extra day and rented a car—the kids got a chance to see, in a sense, where the whole American story began.

By the time we visited Colonial Williamsburg, the kids had ceased to be amazed by living history museums and hundreds-of-years-old buildings that had been preserved and restored. Too bad, really, because Williamsburg really is amazing, if only because of its size and scope. The town exists as it did on the eve of the Revolutionary War—period costumes, furniture, re-enactments, the whole bit. On the recommendation of a friend, we decided not to buy admission tickets and simply see what we could for free. We parked at the Visitor’s Center and watched a free film there on the Revolutionary War (very good) and got on the free shuttle bus which makes a circuit around Colonial Williamsburg and stops at important places where you can hop off/on. We walked around the 1774 town and peeked into windows and watched a demonstration of Revolutionary War cannons. We even got to hear a rousing speech given on horseback by the Marquis de Lafayette himself! Lunch, of course, is never free, but we found a great sandwich place (the Cheese Shop) and had a lovely picnic on some park benches. Given more time (and more enthusiastic traveling buddies), I would spend the money to go inside the historic buildings and the folk art museum, but with the time and energy we did have, I felt like we got a great idea about what life was like in the colonial era just by walking around Williamsburg.

Taken individually, each site has something valuable to offer, but as a trio, one gets a clear picture of how what started as a small band of English colonists became, over time and with much struggle, the United States of America. On that note, I might suggest an order for visiting the Triangle: start at Jamestown, then go to Williamsburg, and end in Yorktown. Plan to spend at least a day in each place, but be warned—you may start reading plaques and get lost in the Historic Triangle!