After six weeks and two days of waiting, dozens of boats got ready to set sail north. A weather window had finally arrived.

But not all were so sure.

“That’s not a window. It’s barely a porthole!” a guy at the marina posted in all caps, although he had no intention of ever leaving land.

“Don’t go,” the weather router said, like he did the last time, and the time before, so they all ignored him because what would he know.

The captain heard the debates with interest and attention. He checked the weather charts and forecasts and, after much contemplation, he loudly declared, “This is as good as it gets. Let’s get ready to go!”

“Yes!” his first mate yelled, because she longed for the sea and was sick of wearing winter hats and socks.

Before long, the captain and first mate stood in line at the customs office above the fiberglass shop. It was sunny and unusually warm, and a dozen sailors smiled in the queue, full of joy because they were finally heading north to the lands of coconuts. But if you look closely enough, you could see behind the smiles a glimmer of apprehension, for they all knew there was no such thing as an easy passage to the islands in the north.

And so the captain and the first mate walked back to their dinghy with passports stamped. “Are we making a mistake?” the first mate asked as they reached the boat. The captain looked at her with his extra-confident face. “I think we’ll be fine,” he said, which was neither yes nor no.

For the next hour, and with equal measures of excitement and trepidation, they worked to get the boat ready to go. The coffee mugs were stowed, the hatches closed, the VHF turned on, and the anchor raised and lashed tightly with a silver rope, “just in case,” the captain said.

And then they were off, sailing slowly down the channel to the open sea. They sailed past the dozens of boats anchored near Russell and the ferries docked in Paihia, and before they knew it, there was no land that they could see, not even the shade of a mountain top.

The first day came and went without a hitch. The first mate monitored the radar and worked out at the helm. The captain plotted their progress with a sharp pencil on an ancient chart, even though it all felt safe. The waves rocked the boat, gently to one side and then the other, just enough to put the off-shift crew to sleep so they could dream of sunny beaches and colorful fish.

So magical was the second day, and then the third.

But the fourth day came, and the winds picked up. And then, on the fifth, the waves rose above the cabin top. At first, they managed. They reefed the sails and wore the fancy jackets with the yellow hoods, because that’s what real sailors do when the ocean gets rough.

And on the sixth, it wasn’t funny anymore.

Thirty knots was the lightest it got. For hours and hours, it never let up. The waves towered over their heads and crashed into the boat with the force of a million gods. The autopilot threw up its hands and just gave up. And so the boat spun to port towards the wind. The waves hit them on the beam, rocking them so hard that pictures, plates, and phones all ended up on the floor. “I got the helm,” the captain yelled, turning the helm to starboard and resuming their course, sailing on a broad reach towards the pass on the south side of Viti Levu.

“Let’s put one more reef,” the captain said, and in no time, he was standing on the roof securing the tack and the clew, while the first mate expertly choreographed the lines until the third and last reef was finally in place. And as if on cue, the wind picked up even more. For hours they stayed at the helm, wincing when the winds reached 42 knots, and the sound of a freight train was felt in their bones.

“What is that?” the first mate asked, pointing to the headstay as it thrashed side to side like a Mexican piñata about to go boom. “The headstay is loose, but we should be okay,” the captain said, lying through his teeth to keep crew morale up.

So they surfed, or tumbled down the waves, and waited for the mast to come down or the hull to break in two. And when night came, they prayed to the gods to let them see the sun at least once more.

But the boat just kept on sailing north, unaware of the drama transpiring on the deck above. Or maybe she knew and didn’t care. How dare they question her resolve? This is what she was made for.

And on the seventh day, or maybe it was the eighth, dawn arrived as it always does. Two miles from the pass, the winds finally let up, the seas flattened, and the boat glided into the flat waters of the blue lagoon. And there was no bone-rattling noise of runaway trains, just the sound of water sloshing under the hulls and the singing birds welcoming the sun.

Soon after, dark turned into light. The captain made coffee and sat at the helm next to his first mate, who seemed relieved but not quite assured. But if you look closely enough, you’d see a smile growing in both, because now they knew they could take more than they thought.

“Nothing broke,” the captain said.

But she wasn’t amused. “True, but let’s not do that again,” the first mate responded, sitting with coffee in hand, barefoot and with no hat, as the warm morning sun rose in the east.

“Aye Aye,” the captain said.

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Greetings from Fiji!

Thank you for reading this story. We made it safely to Fiji in mid-June, and after spending three weeks traveling in Spain, we are back in the boat and settled in Musket Cove, getting ready for the launch of Fifteen Years to Hiva Oa.

The trip to Spain was full of amazing good news about the book. First, I saw the book in the flesh for the first time and held my first informal book signing event.

Second, I heard from the legendary author Lin Pardey, who wrote an editorial review of my book that is now available on the book’s Amazon profile! Few things are as motivating to a new author as hearing that someone like Lin Pardey liked your book so much she wrote an editorial review.

Reader reviews of the book are now trickling in on both Amazon and Goodreads. If you received an early copy of the book, please consider taking a few minutes to write a review. Even just a single line will help tremendously.

I will be posting often during the book launch from my Instagram account. Follow me there if you want to see footage from the event.

Thank you all for subscribing to my Substack!

N.L. Duran.

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 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’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.