http://content.usatoday.com/communit...ls-the-world/1


Maryland family sells assets, sails world for 7 years


Would you sell all your possessions, quit your job, buy a sailboat and travel
the world? A Maryland family with three children did just that, spending nearly
seven years at sea aboard a 43-foot ketch.

"We just seemed to get along better the longer we were out there," Tom Crafton,
50, formerly a family psychologist, told /The Washington Post/ about his
family's odyssey. "The day we moved onto the boat, the sibling rivalry stopped.
I don't think they ever complained, not once."

He and his wife Kathleen, an ICU nurse, had achieved two-career success in
Anchorage, Md., but their big-house life left them feeling empty and frustrated.
" We looked at each other and said, 'What the hell are we doing?' " Tom recalls
in the story.

So in 2003, the family liquidated its assets, learned sailing in Florida
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/31/AR2010073103061.html?sid=ST2010073103147
and set off. They say they lived happily in a cabin the size of a bedroom.

"I would never trade the time we had to raise our kids out there, seeing the
world through their eyes, being together 24/7," Kathleen tells the /Post. /"But
now it's time for them to come back and learn more about their own country.They
need to start their own lives," she says of her kids, ages 15, 18 and 22.

"And plus," she laughs, "we're flat broke."


the REST of the story...


Crafton family enjoys rare closeness after seven years together at sea

By Steve Hendrix http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/articles/steve+hendrix/
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2010

After living the past seven years in this cabin the size of a hotel bathroom,
the Crafton family seems in no hurry to clear out now. On a muggy, sun-drenched
morning, all five of them -- knees just touching, lives completely entwined--
sit cheerfully in the sailboat that has been their home since they pulled away
from this Severna Park dock in 2003.

This Story

*
Trading life on land for love of family

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2010/07/31/ST2010073103147.html
*
Family comes ashore after seven years at sea

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/07/31/GA2010073102623.html

Kalena, 18, who went through puberty and adolescence in this room, has her eyes
fixed on a laptop slideshow of their travels that's playing on the galley table.
For her, college awaits on land. Her mother, Kathleen, fingers a Melanesian
carving she picked up in a trade during one of the family's countless island
anchorages; the relaunch of her nursing career can wait until next week. Jena,
22, and Ben, 15, settle in for yet another telling of the family's greatest
adventures (such as the three-day trek into the mountains of Papua New Guinea,
or the village festival no white people had seen before).

Tom, the dad, is most ensconced of all in the confines of the 43-foot ketch. If
it were up to him, the Nueva Vida would still be out there and America 2010
could wait.

"I went to a Wal-Mart the first week we were back, and I had to come home and
take a nap," says Tom, rolling his ice-gray eyes and leaning against the teak
bulkhead. "It's way too soon for that. Some of our cruising friends warned us
about reentry. Baby steps, baby steps."

After seven years at sea, the Crafton Five are coming ashore, but slowly. They
are in no hurry to shed the awe they feel about what they have accomplished: an
83-month, 30,000-mile circumnavigation of both the globe and the roughest years
of their kids' childhoods.

"We just seemed to get along better the longer we were out there," marvels Tom,
who turned 50 in May as they crept through the doldrums of the equatorial
Atlantic. "The day we moved onto the boat, the sibling rivalry stopped. I don't
think they ever complained, not once."

His wife bobs her head slightly in the wake created by a small boat puttering by
on Cattail Creek, just off the Magothy River. She concedes that she was the
driving force behind the decision to finally point the bow homeward, but she,
too, would set out all over again -- if the kids were younger.

"I would never trade the time we had to raise our kids out there, seeing the
world through their eyes, being together 24/7," she says. "But now it's time for
them to come back and learn more about their own country. They need to start
their own lives."

"And plus, we're flat broke," she adds with a laugh.

*Focusing on family*

It took everything the Craftons had to keep afloat for most of the trip, but
that was largely the point. After achieving two-career success in Anchorage
(Kathy as an ICU nurse, Tom as a family psychologist), the couple found that
big-house status and plenty of everything left them feeling not much of
anything, save frustration and want. With both Jena and Ben having significant
developmental and speech delays, what the parents really craved was less stuff
and more time together.

"We looked at each other and said, 'What the hell are we doing?' " Tom says.

It took six months to liquidate everything. By 2001, they had sold two houses in
Alaska and their share of a family property in Severna Park, where Tom grew up.
With the proceeds, they bought the sturdiest ocean crosser they could find, a
Taiwanese-built Hans Christian with twin yellow masts, and set forth.

It was an adjustment, of course. There were head bumps in the tiny sleeping
berths and five hurricanes during the year and a half they spent prepping in
Florida. But almost at once, an instinctive choreography emerged, allowing five
people to colonize a space not much larger than a minivan.

This Story

*
Trading life on land for love of family

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2010/07/31/ST2010073103147.html
*
Family comes ashore after seven years at sea

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/07/31/GA2010073102623.html

The close quarters stayed remarkably clear of clutter. They even got rid of the
small refrigerator, not wanting to run the smelly engine just to keep beer cool.
At sea, they lived on fish and canned goods. Ashore, they delighted in taking
jitney buses to the market each day, living a local's life.

They wandered the Americas for a couple of years, finally crossing the Panama
Canal in 2006. This was pure blue-water cruising, sailing for miles and for
months between Pacific Islands. Vanuatu, where the people owned the least and
smiled the most, was one of their favorites. They stayed three months.

"They are the happiest people in the world," Tom says. "It reinforced everything
we believed about putting time with the family over this blind pursuit of
material things."

There was a break, 18 months in a New Zealand harbor. They would have settled
there permanently but for bureaucratic hassles and the cost of living. To buy a
house would have meant selling the boat, and that wasn't an option. "She's like
a member of our family now," Kathy says.

And so they sailed, ever westward. Even now, they make a point of gathering to
watch the sunset together, and of getting up early to see it rise.

In many places, they traded for fresh food from the canoes that surrounded them
when they dropped the hook in an island harbor. Bunches of bananas and mountains
of fish could be had for an empty plastic bottle, coveted for storage in places
where /everything/ is biodegradable.

But it wasn't all mangoes and papayas. Their Pacific diet also included betel
nuts, kava (a ceremonial hallucinogen), fish intestines and, at separate events,
dog and bat. Last spring, during the final 43-day crossing from Ascension Island
to Charleston, S.C., they lived almost entirely on canned tuna. "Ascension is
the worst place to provision," says Tom. "It's like a desert with volcanoes."

They spent hours in that first grocery store in Charleston. "Oh my God,
Pop-Tarts!" Kalena, who goes by Kali, remembers exclaiming.

*Together still*

They were done. Although Tom still yearns for those days when cyclone season was
the only item on his calendar, even he cops to the emotional fatigue of facing
potential hazards month after month, connected to their former lives only by
sporadic e-mail via high-frequency radio.

After seven years without using a credit card, they went into debt the day they
reached the United States, paying marina fees upon their arrival. A few weeks
after getting back to Tom's parents' house in Severna Park, they are still
debriefing each other on a remarkable chapter in their family history.

Least favorite ocean: the turbulent Indian ("the washing machine," they call
it). Worst moment on land: when the jeep they were riding in plunged over a
ridge on a steep New Guinean mountain. Rudest encounter: a few days after
reaching Maryland, when a cranky boat owner warned Jena and Ben to keep their
rowboat away.

"I can't remember a mean word anywhere else on our trip," Tom says. "We're
relearning how things are around here."

And maybe doing some teaching, too. Tom thinks the experience that buoyed his
own family so profoundly could be a model for anyone looking for a kinder,
family-focused way to navigate the world. He's working on a book and hopes to
find some public-speaking gigs.

For now, they plan to stay in their floating cocoon. Tom will home-school Ben;
Kathy will begin a nursing job in Baltimore in August. Jena has already joined a
choir at a church down the road. Kali, who evolved from an 11-year-old passenger
to an ace sailor, multilingual adventurer and published essayist (Cruising
World, August 2010), is climbing onto the launching pad. She's applying to
college, working part time, and beginning to meet friends and venture away from
her two-mast shelter.

"It's nice to be able to make some long-term plans, yeah, rather than changing
countries every month," she says. Faintly freckled with a friendly grin, she
could have stepped from a Norman Rockwell painting, except for the henna chain
snaking up her ankle. "It's nice to get some space."

After spending most every night of the past seven years sharing a V-shaped
mattress in the bow compartment with her sister, last week Kali spent her first
night ashore in her grandparents' air-conditioned guest room. It was very still,
very roomy and very lonely.

"I missed the boat," she says. "I missed being with everyone."