Kurt & PL of SV OSPREY

We've all got stories. Some of them are passionately inspiring, others the mad excuse we used to propel us around the world on sail boats. Kurt and PL's story is different, or at least it seemed so when I met them in 1995. Lynn Dicks of Vancouver, Nancy Erley and I had sailed into Opua, New Zealand from Tonga on Tethys. Lynn's husband, Chuck, had flown in to meet her at the yacht club and Kurt and PL were just coming ashore for sundowners with other cruisers. We all shook hands and talked of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. I remember them as intently kind people, almost shy and overly polite compared to those of us just leaping off boats and running for the beer and showers after the hairy passages we'd made crossing the Pacific. It didn't take long to learn more about why Kurt and PL were so serious about life, and almost meditative. They openly told us about the mystery and loss of their son. We saw them again in Rebak Marina in Malaysia in 1999, and PL was one of the first women to come out of the crowd and give us a hug when we celebrated the end of the circumnavigation in Seattle, 2001. They still have Osprey near their home in Port Orchard, Washington and Kurt's book, The Flight of the Osprey, will be published November 2005. Click on the link to go to their website. We all have a story, and I encourage any of you who have published your stories to email me here. I'd love to post all the books and magazine articles I can to help keep our stories alive and in reach of one another. There's a reason we go sailing, and our reasons are individual and yet, profoundly universal.