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

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.

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.