I am trying to teach the kids (and myself, to be honest) that if you choose to do hard things on purpose, you’ll be prepared to tackle the hard things that life throws at you unexpectedly. Yes - passages suck. We can all agree on that. But when we set foot on land after a treacherous passage, we feel like we have earned that delicious feeling of the sand between our toes. We’ve earned that first bite into a golden mango and the juice that runs down our chins. For one fleeting moment, nothing is taken for granted and we are fully present.

What a difference a day makes. We left the anchorage early yesterday, as soon as the sun illuminated the water enough to see the bottom. We had to navigate through a shallow, narrow reef out of the anchorage, hugging sailboats to one side and coral to the other. Luckily, we were able to watch a couple of other catamarans and follow them out. After a few minutes of motoring, we had our first positive sailing experience; broad reach with around 12 knots of wind most of the way, protected by the outer reefs. We needed that.

We tried to set the anchor over and over again as the sky grew darker and darker. It wouldn’t catch. We decided to try another spot in the same anchorage (maybe the ground where we were was just too soft? Or too hard?). We made one last ditch effort right in the most unprotected spot in the anchorage, where the wind funneled fiercely through the two islands at the outer reef. Neighboring sailors watched us with concern. One guy even came over on his dinghy, asked us if we had ever anchored before (so embarrassing) and assured us that if we just dumped out all of our chain, which we told him was 100 meters, he was 100% sure that we would be fine.

Thirty hours after leaving Cartagena, Colombia, guided by our trustee cell phone GPS (since we had lost all of the electronics on the boat at sunrise), we made our way into the anchorage of Porvenir where we checked in with Customs and got our permits for San Blas, Panama.

Like clockwork, as the sun rose, the moon set. It would have been perfect…except at this precise moment, alarms starting sounding, waking up the rest of the crew and signifying that we had lost GPS, AIS and navigation. Luckily, we were just a couple hours from land and cell service, which guided us into the anchorage of Isla Porvenir.

This little dream of ours has been years in the making. Some of us might say it dates back to when we were ten and we read Huckleberry Finn on our grandfather's houseboat. For others, it seems it was born as teenagers when we realized there was a whole world out there and we didn’t know when or how but we desperately needed to see it. Or maybe it started when, in the blink of an eye, our babies went from taking their first steps to being painfully close to walking right out our front door.