“I think I have at least one more trip in me on my own boat!”
My dad Dennis isn’t normally the type to be inspiring, but I gotta hand it to him. After all the sailing he’s done with me through 59º North—from Iceland and Sweden to the South Pacific—he still wasn’t satisfied. There’s nothing quite like cruising on your own boat, and he still had something left to prove.
A few years ago my dad sold his Wauquiez Hood 38, a boat he’d bought with my mom, had taken cruising twice since her death (she died in 2012 from brain cancer), and which represented the last connection to the sailing dreams they had shared. He bought a “practical” boat instead, a Catalina 31, thinking he’d daysail it on the bay. It took nearly a year for him to rename it Sojourner, the name of all his boats since before I was born.
“Sojourner” means traveler, and I think my dad believed his traveling days were over.
He was never truly happy with the Catalina and barely used it. I think to him it represented defeat. So when the opportunity arose to go partners on a Grand Banks with the son of one of his oldest friends, the lightbulb went off and practicality—his forte—went out the window. Here was his chance for at least one last hurrah.
I was last in the Exumas in 1994, when I was 10. I’ve told some version of this “origin story” of mine many times—my mom and dad took me and my younger sister Kaitie out of school for a year, and we lived aboard our 36-foot Allied Princess ketch with two cats named Ketchie and Salty. Mom was the lead schoolteacher (we were in 4th and 2nd grade, respectively), and Dad was the captain. We started the cruise on the Chesapeake in October. I remember my dad returning from the Annapolis Boat Show with a big red med kit he’d bought: the last piece of kit we needed before shoving off.
We moseyed down the ICW over the course of the fall, setting up for the Gulf Stream crossing with a few other buddy boats in Key Biscayne. More vivid memories—setting sail in the middle of the night, with the full moon high in the sky so we could make landfall in Bimini in daylight. My cat, Salty, jet black with a white nose, liked to “surf” on the upturned inflatable we had lashed to the foredeck, and I can still picture her moonlit silhouette from that night. Anchoring on the banks in the middle of nowhere ahead of our first Bahamian stop in the Berry Islands. My first Bahamian snorkel, holding hands with my mom while we swam across a reef teeming with colors and fish.
This year, at Christmas in the Abacos, Mia, our five-year-old son Axel, my sister and her husband, and I joined my dad aboard his new Grand Banks for two blissful weeks cruising islands I’d never visited before. All of those “foundational” memories came flooding back. I loved showing Axel how to dive for conch and starfish. When I got wind that my dad wanted to take the boat all the way to Georgetown—a trip neither of us expected to happen again—there was no way I was going to miss it.
We made our first Exuma landfall at Allen’s, not only the logical first stop coming down across the “Middle Ground” bank from Spanish Wells, but also a place I badly wanted to revisit. We anchored on the backside to shelter from a northwesterly and immediately dinghied ashore to look for those silly iguanas I’d first seen as a kid, who made no effort to hide from us, instead looking for handouts of lettuce we’d brought along. Just like I remembered.
We continued south, hitting some of the most familiar spots while trying to stick to our tight schedule—Staniel Cay, where we watched the Super Bowl at the yacht club, which still has the same pool table I played on in 1994, and where my dad and I swam together again in Thunderball Cave 33 years later; Rudder Cay, where we explored the pond where we’d rode out a cold front in 1994; and of course Georgetown, where we anchored right off of “Volleyball Beach,” the same spot we’d spent nearly a month in 1994. Back then it was just a beach with some volleyball nets. Today there’s a beach bar and lots of development down along the coast, but for the most part it felt the same.
But it was Allen’s, our first Exumas stop in 1994, and my first Exumas landfall on return, that made the biggest impact on me. I had a moment on that beach, walking back to the dinghy in the golden light just before sunset to grab a beer, when the memories of being here at ten years old resurged along with the sense of joy I felt at being here again with my dad. I teared up just thinking about how proud I am of him for finding what he loves the most and just doing it.
That’s inspiring.
This article was originally published in the May 2026 issue.
