Sail Cowabunga

The boys enjoying the beginning of their journey of 10 years at sea Sailing Cowabunga.

P.S. NO, My Kids Did Not  Wear Life Jackets For Ten Years At Sea!

Award winning author of Sail Cowabunga! A Family’s 10 Years at Sea, Janis Couvreux is a journalist, sailor, mom, grandmom, traveler, and Franco-American, blogging at the Huffington Post,  The Lady Alliance, about living bilingually, crossing oceans, backpacking adventures, and raising kids outside the box.

Interview by Paul Cody with

Mike McKinnon ( The Captain ) Retired Submarine & Naval Base Commander.

From Bordeaux, France to San Francisco, California, Sail Cowabunga! A Family’s 10 Years at Sea, follows a Franco-American couple and their two young sons across the Atlantic Ocean and into a ten-year journey at sea. Through their adventures and misadventures, tragedies, and glories across four continents, the Couvreux family rarely had a dull moment living on the water.

Janis chronicles in vivid and lively detail how they fended off a midnight intruder, sailed to the microscopic St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks on the equator, explored the jungles of French Guiana and Devil’s Island, and sailed through Cuba in the turmoil of the late 80s. Their adventure was not without hardship, however, as Janis recounts battling medical emergencies that required sending her husband across the globe for treatment (twice), leaving her to single-handedly orchestrate a Panama Canal passage amid pre-war chaos. While living in the close quarters of their 42-foot sailboat, the Cowabunga, the Couvreux family was able to maintain sanity and a normal daily routine of cooking, schooling, and sleeping at sea, knowing all the while that something unexpected might be waiting just around the next peninsula.

Enjoy