I began writing my debut novel, Fifteen Years to Hiva Oa, in the mid-2010s, right around the time my wife and I made a 10-year plan to quit our jobs and start sailing around the world. We were living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My mother had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and my father-in-law with cancer. Chris Peterson, a colleague at the University, had unexpectedly died. He was one of the founders of the field of positive psychology and had written extensively about what it meant to live a life worth living. He certainly did. So it was quite a heavy time spent reflecting on issues of purpose and meaning. Those events inspired the book.

Influenced by my brief stint in film, the first version of the book was a screenplay treatment. It was just an outline of the key scenes of the overall story. I recently read that old treatment and cringed at how bad my writing was at the time. Yet, I was surprised at how much of that initial story made it into the final book. The overall plot, the characters—Tom, Cindy, the kids, Roger—the boat, and even the final scene were all there from the beginning.

It wasn’t until 2024, after we moved into our boat in Antigua and started our own circumnavigation, that I began converting the treatment into a book. By then, my brain was full of ideas gathered during the years it took us to get there. Stories about the sailing community in Lake St. Clair, about the struggles in finding and refitting a boat, and the heartbreaking accounts of sailing dreams cut short by illness and death. Then, as we sailed south through the Caribbean, the Panama Canal, and eventually to the shores of Hiva Oa, our experiences gave life to the second half of the book. The incidents in Carriacou, the arepas place in Bonaire, the scare with the powerboat off the coast of Colombia, and the tree stuck in the rudder on the way to the Galapagos all happened to us in one way or another.

I finished an ugly first draft in Hiva Oa, of all places. It wasn’t planned, but it felt inevitable. I subjected a dozen beta readers to that early version and benefited immensely from their feedback. Multiple drafts and rounds of review followed. And slowly, I stopped cringing and began smiling when I read each line.

Earlier this week, I finished the final version of the book while at anchor in Great Barrier Island, New Zealand. It was almost 10 years after I wrote the original treatment. My mother and my father-in-law have both been gone a while now. I wish they’d had a chance to read it. After all, this is a story about the pursuit of a life worth living. They certainly did.

The ebook and paperback versions of Fifteen Years to Hiva Oa will be released in mid 2026. A launch party with the cruising community will take place in Musket Cove, Fiji. Free advanced copies will be available for those interested in writing a review.

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In 1990s Detroit, Tom and Cindy are tormented by the feeling that life should mean more than their dead-end jobs. They dream of buying a sailboat, leaving it all behind, and sailing around the world with their kids. After a decade of waiting, Tom and Cindy finally find a weathered sailboat they can afford. Their daughter names it Hiva Oa, after the mystical island in the Pacific. For years, family and friends work tirelessly to restore Hiva Oa to her former ocean-crossing self. Yet, just as the ocean is finally within reach, Tom is diagnosed with cancer. With time running out, Cindy pushes Tom to decide whether to keep wasting his uncertain future rebuilding a boat that might never set sail, or cast off the lines now and head to the atolls of the South Pacific before it’s too late. Fifteen Years to Hiva Oa is a tender yet raw novel about what one family is willing to sacrifice in the pursuit of a life worth living.

Recent micro-stories in case you missed them:

• Running from a hurricane

• A lunch break and a swim

• Niue’s Crane

We sailed to Grenada on Saturday, June 29^th, two days before the hurricane hit. Our nerves were already on edge after the fiasco in Carriacou. There, a confused old sailor was motoring around the harbour with his anchor down, hooked our chain, and dragged us behind, all while yelling, “I’ve got no fingers,” as if that could explain what was happening. And I guess it did. Twenty-four hours later, we anchored at a nearly full Secret Harbour on Grenada’s southern coast to prepare for the storm. It was a small cove surrounded by short green hills and mangroves, with room for a dozen boats at most. A perfect hurricane hole, if no one else came in.

We were scheduled to haul out at Clark’s Court Marina on July 1^st, the day the storm was expected to hit. But there was no chance. Even if the storm tracked north as forecast, the winds would still be too high for the crane. We were stuck there.

So we prepared to ride out the storm in that small anchorage. We took the sails down, removed the enclosures, and secured the cockpit. We then watched in horror as hour after hour, boats continued to arrive. By the end of the day, the anchorage was so cramped that if anyone dragged, and many surely would, there would be carnage.

At four in the morning, I woke up to check the weather projections. I got nauseous. Hurricane Beryl had formed into a Category 5 monster storm and refused to track north. It was now expected to hit the north coast of Grenada in the early morning of July 1^st. The southern coast would see winds exceeding 80 knots. Worse yet, we would get southwest winds and swell that would funnel through the bay, transforming that peaceful cove into a washing machine.

“What’s going on?” Yolanda asked, still half asleep.

“It’s not good,” I said.

“Does it involve death and destruction?”

“Yup.”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she said.

Still in the dark, we unpacked and reinstalled the sails, submitted the required passage plan to Trinidad’s coast guard, and began motoring south across the bay. We faced an uncertain 14-hour sail to Trinidad.

The local WhatsApp groups were buzzing with panicked sailors like us, wondering what to do about immigration and the consequences of leaving without clearing customs. Would we even be allowed to enter Trinidad? “Just come over, and we’ll sort it out here,” said Jesse James. The legendary cruising advocate in Trinidad was working tirelessly with the authorities to assist the hundreds of yachts trying to escape the storm. His magic worked. Trinidad welcomed us all with open arms.

“I hope we are not the only idiots leaving without clearing out,” I said. We left the bay and pointed our bow south towards Port of Spain. Within minutes, as the sun peeked over the horizon, the answer appeared: hundreds of sails surrounded us in all directions. Sailboats, fishing boats, trawlers, tankers, and ferries—all pointing south, all trying to save their boats and themselves. The great migration of 2024 had begun.

For 14 hours, we sailed in the company of friends and strangers under sunny skies on a perfect beam reach. By late evening, we lined up at the entrance of the narrow Bocas del Dragón channel and motored our way into a different world. Oil platforms lit up the sky like miniature cities protruding from the ocean. But everything else was dark. The wind was gone, the waters calm, and silence was all around. We snaked through the dozens of islands that surround Port of Spain until we finally dropped anchor in Williams Bay. We could finally breathe.

We stayed up for hours in the quiet anchorage, waving as boat after boat arrived from Grenada. Tired sailors with relieved faces, some smiling, some still in shock.

And there we waited for a storm that we barely felt. But to our north, Carriacou was devastated. Hundreds of boats that had hauled out at the Tyrrell Bay boatyard were destroyed. Not a single boat at anchor was spared. We knew many of them. Close friends who lost it all. And I thought about the guy with no fingers, and wondered if he got out of there in time.

Story Notes & Book Updates:

• Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. If you enjoy this story, click “like” to help more readers discover it.

• This is a true story that happened in the summer of 2024. Ironically, we sailed to Grenada at the end of June because our insurance required us to be in Grenada by July 1st, the official start of the hurricane season. Grenada was supposed to be outside the hurricane zone. We weren’t the only ones. Hundreds of boats from all the Caribbean had sailed there that June. Hurricane don’t go that south. Hurricanes don’t form that early in the season. Well, Zeus surely had a wicked sense of humor that year.

• In book news, Hiva Oa, my first novel, is officially in the query trenches! I worked with an editor to polish the query package in December and sent the first large batch of query letters at the start of the year.

• I’ll soon be working on the next draft of The Last Harbour, my second novel. I received very helpful feedback from beta readers, and I’m very excited about this project. It’s a dystopian story about three sailboats crossing the Pacific when global conflict erupts. I hope it will become a series, as I already have book two and three mapped out in my head :-). There will be lots of writing in 2026!

About Me

I’m Nestor Lopez-Duran, writing under the pen name N.L. Duran. I am a former psychology professor now sailing around the world with my wife on our sailboat named Blue Buddha. The stories published in Currents & Wind are inspired by the people, places, creatures, and events I encounter at sea.

At the end of a long road, there is a boatyard, where boats are suspended in the air, bottoms sanded, patchy, and naked. To the right of the entrance, there is a gate, and a dirt road leads to nowhere. Nothing on the map. But the guy said “G’day, Mate,” as he ran past me. A leash attached to his waist and an Australian Shepherd panting behind. So I climbed over the gate and walked around the yard and past dirt fields cleared of life. Past bushes and shrubs, and past the mangroves that line the shallows of Whangarei, until, on the horizon, I saw two masts. A schooner. I walked, looking for the bay, but there was no sea. Just fields of tall grasses and wildflowers, and floating above, a lone boat, anchored in the dirt.

• Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. If you enjoy this story, click “like” to help more readers discover it.

• This micro story is part of Harbour Stories, a collection of non-fiction accounts of the places and people I encounter at ports.

  About Me

I’m Nestor Lopez-Duran, writing under the pen name N.L. Duran. I am a former psychology professor now sailing around the world with my wife on our sailboat named Blue Buddha. The stories published in Currents & Wind are inspired by the people, places, creatures, and events I encounter at sea.

We were moored in waters so clear we could see every coral on the bottom, eighty feet deep, and 100 yards from the shore of Bonaire’s Kralendijk. A couple was having lunch at a picnic table on the boardwalk. I’d seen that peculiar scene the day before: a lunch break and a swim. We watched them closely, wondering if it would happen again. Maybe a date, or a husband and wife on their daily routine. Then their clothes came off, bathing suits on, and they walked down the concrete steps into the water below. They talked, splashed each other, and swam on their backs. In less than ten minutes, they were back at their table. Clothes on, a peck on the cheek, and off they went on their separate ways.

“I love this place!” my wife said while watching the scene unfold on shore. It was one of the many unusual water rituals we had seen since we arrived in Bonaire. By then, we had visited most Caribbean islands. For most, the sea was work: fishermen gutting their catch, ferries shuttling locals across islands, the big ships unloading the cargo of modern life. But the sea was so much more than work on the shores of Kralendijk. Here, the sea was life, and it felt like home.

By late afternoons, the Kralendijk boardwalk would fill with locals. Couples walking their dogs, runners, cyclists, the oldies walking in groups, and the random singles heading home after work. And inevitably, at some point, everyone would end up in the water, dogs and all. “I think they are just chilling there,” I said, pointing at the circles of people forming on the sea. With the water chest-deep, old friends talked about their day and their kids’ upcoming soccer games. And then slowly, we watched them return to land, smiling and refreshed, as if the sea had rinsed their stress away.

Here, the water was an extension of their daily lives. And for the first time since we’d moved into our boat, my wife said, “Let’s move to Bonaire.” We had found our kind. It was an island of cruisers who just happened to live on land.

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• Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. If you enjoy this story, click “like” to help more readers discover it.

• This micro story is part of Harbour Stories, a collection of Non-fiction accounts of the places and people I encounter at ports

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  Books Update!

• I will start the query* process for my first novel, Hiva Oa, once we finally arrive in New Zealand in about one week! Thank you so much to all the beta readers who provided feedback and to my wife for the excellent editing work!

• Beta reading feedback from my second book, The Last Harbor, began to arrive this week, and I’m beyond excited about the potential for this book. I hope to start writing the new draft in December once the query process for Hiva Oa is up and running. Thank you to all the beta readers!

  *For those not familiar with the journey of books, querying is the process of trying to find an agent to represent the book with the big publishing houses.

• About Me

I’m Nestor Lopez-Duran, writing under the pen name N.L. Duran. I am a former psychology professor now sailing around the world with my wife on our sailboat named Blue Buddha. The stories published in Currents & Wind are inspired by the people, places, creatures, and events I encounter at sea.

From miles away, it was massive and completely flat. It looked like another low-lying South Pacific atoll. The closer we got, the flatness remained, but the island rose a hundred feet into the sky, like a perfectly cut block of stone emerging from the sea. We had reached the island of Niue.

After a nine-day passage from French Polynesia, we sailed south along Niue’s west coast, protected from the trades by the limestone cliffs that plunged vertically into the blue: a curtain wall of coral and rock that once protected the island from the empires that colonized most other atolls across the Pacific. Centuries later, it still serves as a deterrent. Only a few vessels stop on the island each year while crossing the Pacific. There were no safe harbours, no bays, breakwalls, outer reefs, or anything else to protect the vessels from the Pacific swell. Just mooring balls on an exposed field below the town of Alofi.

“Niue Radio, Niue Radio, Niue Radio. This is sailing vessel Blue Buddha,” we called on Channel 16 and asked permission to stop. Before sunset, we tied to a mooring buoy next to a couple of sailboats and stared at the town above the cliff. A steep road led to the only dock. It was not a traditional pier supported by columns that let the ocean move freely below it. It was a solid block of concrete rising vertically twenty feet above the crashing swell. No boats were tied to it; instead, they were lying above on the dock, like someone had plucked them from the ocean and put them safely on shore. And then we saw it. A dinghy from another boat was floating in the air, being lifted from the water by a crane. It was the only path from the sea to the land above.

The next morning, we anxiously motored our tiny dinghy, Mr. Peanut, towards the imposing concrete dock. We had studied the self-serve crane maneuver with binoculars, and we hoped to be ready. I positioned the dinghy against the concrete wall so my wife could reach the steps carved into the structure. With a single hop, she was on and heading up to the base of the crane to reach the controls. I hooked the dinghy onto the one-inch thick cable. She pressed up, and the dinghy rose from the ocean. For the first time in his brief life, Mr. Peanut was soaring through the air, flying without wings.

Before long, the dinghy was resting on the concrete floor. The customs officer greeted us with a smile. We were officially on the rock island of the Pacific. A crowd was gathering on the dock. Not to welcome us, but to watch the spectacle behind the sailboats. A whale surged from the water, like the bow of a boat refusing to sink, and then crashed back into the deep.

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• Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. If you enjoy this story, click “like” to help more readers discover it.

• This micro story is part of Harbour Stories, a collection of non-fiction accounts of the places and people I encounter at ports

About Me

I’m Nestor Lopez-Duran, writing under the pen name N.L. Duran. I am a former psychology professor now sailing around the world with my wife on our sailboat named Blue Buddha. The stories published in Currents & Wind are inspired by the people, places, creatures, and events I encounter at sea.

At sea, there is no place to stop. No rest stops, no hotels, no dirt road to pull onto and wait till morning. When the sun sets, we keep on sailing. There is always someone on. At 2:45 am, my alarm goes off. It’s time for my 3-6 shift. I look up and see my wife at the helm, eager for her break. I turn on the red headlamp and search for my jacket and PFD. I fill my pockets with all I need: headphones, cookies, a Kindle, and my phone. At 2:55, I report for duty. The change is mechanical and efficient: wind speed, wind angle, heading, islands and reefs, boats, storms, sea state. She leaves the helm for the comfort of the saloon couch. I sit and stare at the red-lit instrument panel, still too sleepy to make sense of it. Slowly, I settle. I watch the radar and see nothing. I check the wind angle and speed, and tweak the jib trim for no reason at all. Habits. Without the moon, there is nothing out there. Just darkness. Maybe the white caps of the waves when they break on our beam. Maybe a bird flies by close enough to startle me. Mostly, it’s emptiness until I look up and see a million stars. I’m equally awestruck and terrified. Each one reminding me of the insignificance of it all. And then the wind picks up. I reef the sails and put the hood of my jacket on. Chaos everywhere. Wind humming, rig grunting, fiberglass creaking, waves crashing. I hold on to the side of the seat as the boat climbs and falls through the building swell. Soon after, fear gives way to acceptance, and on a good day, excitement. On those days, I put the headphones on and press play. The music drowns out the chaos. A voice sings about small towns and little sun. The noise disappears. It feels magical, a calmness divorced from the chaos around me. The boat rises above the wave. It accelerates at the crest. I brace for the drop, but it never comes. We keep going, faster and faster, surfing on its crest. We are gliding, flying, like a foiling dinghy on a lake. But we are no dinghy. We are a house riding the waves of the Pacific.

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• Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. If you enjoy this story, click “like” to help more readers discover it.

• This micro story is part of Passage Life, a collection of brief reflections and descriptions of life in the open ocean.

About Me

I’m Nestor Lopez-Duran, writing under the pen name N.L. Duran. I am a former psychology professor now sailing around the world with my wife on our sailboat named Blue Buddha. The stories published in Currents & Wind are inspired by the people, places, creatures, and events I encounter at sea.

I jumped off the pole of that boat, hoping to fly and then to glide. But I misjudged the jump like I was a dumb tern. The ship plunged as I tried to jump, and I fell forward into the sea. I flapped and flapped to get some lift. Damn you boat, I thought as I got ready to feel the water on my red feet! But then I felt the lift-off. Steady beats, and up and up I go. I’ve had enough of boats and fish. Homebound, I went. I saw the sun and felt the pull from that distant pole, and I knew I had fucked up. I should not have stayed on that boat for that long. I should have gone with the gang long ago. 300km to go was my guess. So I climbed, 10, 20, 50 meters above the sea, not for fish, but for the wind that’d take me home to my sweet Clementine. It was a trick my daddy taught me when I was a kid. Fly like an albatross, he said! So I did, until one day I went to 300 meters! I got confused. I got too cold. And I almost ended up in Peru. I am no albatros, I knew, so I stayed no higher than 50 and found good wind. I glided home, smelling the distant cliffs. For hours, I went directly towards her wings. And then I saw the gang below. Boobies and gulls, and some whimbrels too, having a blast on top of a rusty Panamanian floating fridge. And I could not resist. It was time to rest. I plunged in at full speed. Kraaaka! Kraaaka! Kraaaka!! I yelled. Get out of my way! And it was enough to scare a few into flying away. I landed softly and unencumbered, laughing as I watched them climb into the skies. “That wasn’t nice,” he said. “Fernando! Why aren’t you with your mum?” I yelled. And he took off, white like a gull, and we all laughed and laughed as my scared child flew home.

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• Thank you for reading. This flash story is part of Stanley and Fernando, a series of flash fiction about a parent-son duo of red-footed boobies living near the Galapagos Islands.

• I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. If you enjoy this story, click “like” to help more readers discover it.

About Me

I’m Nestor Lopez-Duran, writing under the pen name N.L. Duran. I am a former psychology professor now sailing around the world while writing fiction and reflections on life at sea.

After four days at sea, we had left the familiar shores of the Eastern Caribbean and dropped the anchor in water so still and blue that you’d think we were at a lake in the Alps. But this was no Alps. It was the humid shores of Guna Yala on the northeast coast of Panama. We anchored outside El Porvenir, the town with the “airport and the immigration offices, and the place where we could buy local bread,” or so the guidebook said. And that description conjured an image, a schema, that fit the type of place where you find those things. But we were definitely not at that place.

There were signs, though. A large yellow Guna Yala flag with a big red swastika in the middle welcomed the potential visitors at a small dock. A deflated windsock on a pole marked the start of a small airstrip that doubled as a pen for two dozen donkeys. And two wooden buildings stood on the island, housing the community office and a small military outpost with two Panamanian guards.

“Do we have to fly that swastika flag?” the wife asked.

I knew about the Guna Yala flag. I knew the symbol preceded the Nazis by centuries. But it was still a swastika. And that meant that complying with the tradition of flying the host country flag from the starboard spreader of our mast would involve cruising around with a big swastika flying on our boat.

“Nope,” I said. “We don’t have that flag.”

And then we saw a small canoe coming towards us. Being approached by locals when we reached a new anchorage was nothing new. It was usually a young guy on a small powerboat, wearing a Chicago Bulls hat or some other American cultural export, offering a tour of the island or fresh lobster for a couple of bucks. But this wasn’t it. This was not a powerboat. It was a silent paddle canoe made from a single tree trunk, commanded by three Guna women wearing red scarves on their heads and colorful traditional dresses embroidered with intricate geometric patterns. Their lower legs were wrapped in vibrant bead bracelets that, from a distance, resembled leg warmers, perfectly matching the patterns of their dresses.

And for the first time since we moved onto our boat and began exploring the islands of the Caribbean, we encountered a culture intact and proud, seemingly immune to the influence of a globalized Western world.

The women smiled as they reached our boat. One pulled a set of Guna Yala flags from a bag.

“Guna flag. Fifteen dollars,” the oldest of the women said in heavily accented English. She pointed at the mast. “Guna flag, for your boat.”

They thanked us as they took our money and left paddling towards the dock. We raised the Guna Flag, swastika and all, on the starboard spreader of our mast.

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• Thank you for reading. A fictionalized version of this true story is included in the Panama chapter of my first novel, Hiva Oa.

• I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. If you enjoy this story, click “like” to help more readers discover it.

• This story is part of Harbour Stories, a collection of brief reflections and descriptions of the harbours we have visited while sailing around the world.

About Me

I’m Nestor Lopez-Duran, writing under the pen name N.L. Duran. I am a former psychology professor now sailing around the world while writing fiction and reflections on life at sea.

I’m sitting at a table on our back porch, 360 miles from the nearest land, drifting west, barely faster than we could walk. The “back porch,” that is what I call our cockpit, the stern of our home. It has a table and seats, and it is perfectly open to the sea. Our home is a sailboat named Blue Buddha.

Nearby, my wife is on watch, sitting at the helm. Every few minutes, she looks up at the horizon, checks the radar screen, and gets back to her Kindle.

It is day 5 of a 10-day passage from Raiatea to Niue in the South Pacific. It is the day I write the first description of our life at sea.

So, I’ll start with the most basic fact: We live on the move with everything we own.

Our clothes, the stove, the dumbbells, and books. A dinghy with a small outboard motor that acts as our family car. A washing machine, a fridge, a freezer, a water maker. Enough food to feed us for a lifetime. Fake plants, small paintings collected in various ports, charts, and a ukulele that has not seen daylight since the days of the pandemic. All of it moves with us aboard our home, crossing oceans and continents for days and weeks with no pause, carried by the wind over large swells, against currents, and into foreign lands.

At sea, our lives exist within the confines of this boat. After the initial shock, after the cacophony of sounds fades into white noise and the rolls and shakes become part of our own motion, our lives move on. We cook and eat. We work, read, sleep, watch TV, play card games, and stare at the sunsets and stars. We change sails, make fresh water, run the engines, and plot our location on a paper chart. Day after day, week after week, we travel west with everything we own on our floating home.

That, at the most basic level, is our life at sea.

• This is the first flash story of Passage Life, a collection of brief reflections and descriptions of life in the open ocean.

• Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. If you enjoy this story, click “like” to help more readers discover it.

About Me

I’m Nestor Lopez-Duran, writing under the pen name N.L. Duran. I am a former psychology professor now sailing around the world while writing fiction and reflections on life at sea.

I’m the last one left. Sitting here on this metal pole on the bow of this boat. There used to be many of us. Mostly boobies but some gulls too. We took over this place like it was our home. We rode the swell, lined up on this rope, and stalked all those fish. It was a feast! We ate. And pooped. And ate some more. But they all left when the boat turned south. “I’m going home”, Fernando said. “I’ve had enough and miss my mum”. So he flew east to the warmth of Santa Cruz. I should have gone with him. Now I’m here, alone, surrounded by filth. I wait and wait for the humans to clean up this mess. They never come, and it’s rude. I see them looking at me. I know they can see the mess. I see disgust in their eyes. I hear them talking about the poop. Blaming it on us, on me. I want to tell them… It’s not my fault. I poop. That’s what birds do! It’s really not my fault. I’ve got no diaper on my butt! And I yell, “Look at this filth! Come clean this mess, for God’s sake!” But no one does. No one speaks bird anymore. I hope they are not expecting me to clean this up. They are the ones with the thumbs. So tomorrow morning, when the sun is up, I will give up. I’ll time the swell and wind, and then I’ll jump.

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• Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. If you enjoy this story, click “like” to help more readers discover it.

• This story is part of Ocean Tales, a collection of micro and flash fiction inspired by the sea and its creatures.

• The Last of the Red-Footed Boobies is the first story in the Stanley & Fernando series, which chronicles the life of a father-son duo of red-footed boobies as they search for meaning while fishing in the Pacific.

About Me

I’m Nestor Lopez-Duran, writing under the pen name N.L. Duran. I am a former psychology professor now sailing around the world while writing fiction and reflections on life at sea.