Quotes from John Kretschmer

crossing the Atlantic under sail remains one of the most fulfilling ways possible to spend a month or so of your precious allotment of time.

Carl's concept of freedom had come to be embodied by a mariner in a storm, wholly responsible for himself, accountable to no one else, asking no quarter from the sea, measuring his worth by his immediate actions.

Time is the currency of our life—how we spend it defines our existence.

But it was the discovery of gold in California in 1849 that caused the clipper ships to dominate travel on the high seas.

From Grenada we soared across the bottom of the Caribbean, staying well offshore of the now-dangerous coast of Venezuela, a once-proud country spiraling into anarchy as its experiment with a populist strongman collapses, standing as a stark warning to other countries.

I love sailboats. No other man-made object blends design, craftsmanship, passion, and pure optimism the way a sailboat does. With a good sailboat, anything is possible.

But there is one thing that I've learned about luck. It rears its head as an opportunity, not a gift, and what seems to separate the lucky from the unlucky is the willingness to take Lady Luck for a ride.

There is always a certain risk in being alive, and if you are more alive, there's more risk." —Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

The very idea that my time could be owned by someone else, monitored by a clock, and traded not for freedom but for money struck me as lunacy. Where did happiness factor in, and what about the desire for a meaningful life defined not by your possessions but by your experiences?

wanted to sail off with my kids, to raise them

a keelboat's theoretical hull speed—the top speed it can attain without surfing or planing—is dictated by a simple formula: the square root of the waterline length multiplied by 1.34.

To thrive at sea, you must be responsible for who you are, not who you want to be.