The Raven Logs: An Introduction

photo credit: Ivor Wilkins

In December of 2004 my husband Mike and I purchased the bluewater capable sailboat Raven and embarked on twelve years of adventure, exploring salt water destinations around the world. Ultimately we visited forty countries by boat, starting in the South Pacific but venturing as far as Indonesia, and closer to home along the west coast of North America from Mexico to Canada, south down the Pacific coast of Central America to transit the Panama Canal, the Caribbean, and finally the east coast of the USA. Along the way we encountered scenic vistas and island cultures far different from what we experience here at home.

Mark Twain wrote in “Innocents Abroad” about the mind-expanding benefits of travel away from your homeland:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Another quote most often attributed to Mark Twain but actually written by H. Jackson Brown Jr. in “P.S. I Love You”:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Our voyaging days have come to an end, and although not quite twenty years have passed since we first set sail, it was well worth having lived by those words. I most certainly am not disappointed, but I am regretful that those days are behind us.

There is always some risk involved. Our captain Rod Bradley’s seamanship was so exemplary that we, and our boats, never came to harm. But unexpected storms can create havoc, yachts do capsize, uncharted coral reefs can rip out the bottom of the boat, medical emergencies can take place a thousand miles from land and the nearest doctor, and if you carelessly fall overboard the odds of being spotted, a small head bobbing between endless ocean swells, are remote. Even piracy is of some concern, more so in some parts of the world than others.

Both our cruising boats were designed by a legendary yacht designer, Steve Dashew, who also happens to be a personal friend. From his own experiences over the decades logging more than 250,000 nautical miles with just his wife and family aboard, he has written multiple magazine articles and several very thick books about boat systems and safety at sea. He is passionate about embedding safety measures into his designs. Boat speed is critical – with enough speed and modern weather reporting, it is possible to predict, outrun and avoid a storm. If inadvertently flipped upside down, the boats will right themselves – although the interior decor will certainly suffer!

When we committed to this lifestyle it was with our bodies in good health, a strong dose of optimism and perhaps a misplaced feeling of invincibility. Most of all, we put our well-placed trust in these experts whose seamanship skills surpassed ours.

Almost from day one I kept a journal online in a blog which was christened The Raven Logs and retitled The AVATAR Logs after we transitioned to our second boat AVATAR – a powerboat. The entries were written in a letters-to-home format as a means for staying in touch with family and friends while we were thousands of miles away on extended absence. At the same time, they served to create a diary of our varied adventures, preserving memories that we could look back on and enjoy again and again.

A few of my earliest efforts have been lost forever. I signed on to one of the very early cloud-based platforms and put a lot of effort into creating an attractive site to host my writings. That small startup platform was purchased by a much larger company, whose name you would recognize. My online content was summarily erased without warning and without any means of retrieval. Lesson learned – cloud computing is great and much more advanced than it was fifteen years ago – but it is a double-edged sword and loss of data can go either way!

I always felt there was a book in those blogs somewhere, but as they accumulated the project seemed more and more unwieldy. A worldwide pandemic seems like a good time to tackle the project. I am finally going back in time to revisit the stories I wrote and review the photos I took on all of our many journeys, in hopes of creating a cohesive whole that can again be enjoyed by family and friends, and anyone else who likes a seagoing adventure.

We were not sharing our expertise as seasoned sailors, which we are not. Nor are we travel experts dispensing advice on best itineraries or insights into cultural differences worldwide. The experiences we shared in our travelogs were more like ‘toe in the water’ stuff. We voyaged as tourists to far destinations and came ashore for brief visits, but always we returned to our Americanized boat with all the comforts of home – electricity and air conditioning powered by our diesel generator, fresh water produced by our state-of-the-art watermaker, scuba gear and an air compressor to refill the tanks, modern kitchen appliances and an extensive pantry of groceries purchased and stockpiled from supermarkets in more developed countries before embarking, a clothes washer and dryer, computers, satellite phone, radar and navigation equipment, and comfortable bedrooms with a thick mattress on the bed, hot water shower and flushable toilets In comparison the village mode of transportation ashore might be by hand-hewn outrigger canoe or a communal ancient pickup truck in questionable mechanical condition. Village laundry was washed in a river, and all food was either fished from the sea or grown in the village gardens. Another advantage to our offshore anchorages – they were out of flying range for the mosquitoes!

I have always been a visual person and photographs were an essential part of my communication. Photos on my blog from those early years were snapshots. Digital cameras in the early 2000s were in their infancy. For the first couple of years I was shooting with digital point and shoot cameras that produced files barely one megapixel in size. The very first interchangeable-lens DSLR to hit the market arrived in 2000. I didn’t get serious about photography until 2006 when the technology had hit its stride and I acquired my first high quality digital camera – a used Nikon from my sister who was switching to Canon (we both shoot Sony now). I had to go online to find photography courses to learn how to operate it.

As the years went by digital camera technology advanced, my skills improved, and the resulting images I captured progressed from snapshots to a career in art from photography! Today my latest and greatest Sony Alpha 1 mirrorless camera can produce image files as large as 50 megapixels at a speed of 20 or 30 frames per second. Ultimately the cruising blog morphed into a photo journal which continues to this day as I still travel and explore, camera in hand, although my floating photography platform has been replaced by travel photo workshops.

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