Family Friendly

In 2015 my wife, Laura, and I were at the Ft. Lauderdale International Boat Show when we came across an eye-opening piece of technology. We were on the Seakeeper demo boat at the mouth of the Port Everglades inlet as a 60-foot Viking sportfish ran circles around us, throwing a big wake. That demo led to a major install of a Seakeeper on our own Carver motoryacht, one I can still recall in vivid detail.

At that time, Laura and I had been seriously discussing a cruise along the Great Loop. Years before, when I started bugging her to take this “little trip,” we were in our mid-thirties with two young children. I was working full-time in financial services technology and traveling most weeks. I think she felt she could write-off my sporadic pestering as simply the aspirations of a daydreamer.

But as 2015 drew to a close my satisfaction with the job was rapidly declining, so I negotiated my departure six months ahead of time. Suddenly, my idle daydream of an extended cruise was a full-on possibility. If we left in the summer of 2016, I reasoned, our kids would be 6 and 9—hopefully, the right ages for a year of traveling and home schooling on board. Laura and I debated the subject quite a bit, but ultimately decided that while there were plenty of reasons not to go, we