We bought a 106-foot sailing yacht sight unseen in Montenegro while living our perfectly happy life in Kodiak, Alaska.
Naturally, everything became complicated after that.
Wow, so much has changed since I last wrote here. We stopped blogging for a while to protect our children’s privacy. Since those early posts, we welcomed our second son into the world, and he’s now two years old as I’m writing this. Somewhere along the way, I found it difficult to write about our adventures without also sharing funny stories and personal moments about the boys, and I wasn’t sure where the line should be anymore.
When I first started blogging years ago, it was mostly to reassure my mom and dad that I would survive voyaging on a 47-foot sailboat. Since then, both of my parents have passed away. I think that’s another reason I stopped writing. I wasn’t sure who I was writing for anymore.
Now, I think the audience is simply myself. A journal of this season of life. A way to remember.
So here we go again.
Leif sailed his first 1,200 nautical miles from Kodiak to Unalaska when he was only ten months old. At the time, we were living aboard SV Just Drifting before eventually buying a house in Kodiak. Leif was almost two, I was pregnant with Ori, and we had settled into a life that honestly felt pretty idyllic.
Kodiak is an incredible place to raise children. The community is supportive, life revolves around the outdoors, and there’s a kind of rugged simplicity there that suited our family well. We still took Just Drifting out occasionally for subsistence fishing and hunting trips, but for a while we stayed relatively close to town.
Then came the summer of 2025.
We decided to spend the season voyaging around Kodiak, and Ori got his first real taste of boat life while circumnavigating the island as a toddler. Somewhere during that summer, surrounded by anchorages, salt spray, and long northern evenings, we remembered how much we truly love being at sea.
Not that it was all peaceful sunsets and magical family moments.
At one point, we lost our freshwater pump, which led to an emergency anchoring situation and the loss of our windlass. But even in the middle of the stress, I felt something unexpected: Wade and I worked well together out there. The adversity strengthened our relationship instead of straining it.
And somewhere during all of that, we found ourselves dreaming about a larger boat.
Enter Sumapina.
We renamed her after a word Leif made up one day. Since it didn’t exist in any language, we decided to give it our own meaning:
“The sound of happiness carried on the wind.”
Sumapina is a 106-foot (32m) Alloy Yachts sailing yacht designed by Ed Dubois and built in New Zealand. And somehow, she became ours.
The purchasing process was… intense. Every hurdle seemed to come with another discount attached to it. In the end, we bought her for roughly half of her original listing price, but the tradeoff was that we had to close without ever seeing her in person.
At the time, the boat was sitting in the Adriatic 42 shipyard in Montenegro.
Because apparently buying a superyacht in another country wasn’t complicated enough, I also broke my wrist ice skating with Leif.
We were pushing a bucket across the ice when we hit a bump. The bucket stopped, but both Leif and I flew forward. Thankfully, he was wearing a helmet and was completely okay. I, however, ended up needing surgery a couple of weeks later.
While recovering, we headed to Iowa for family matters, all while coordinating boat work overseas from a distance. Meanwhile, the shipyard had begun warranty work that was supposed to be completed before launch.
Finally, on May 2nd, we left for Montenegro.
The travel days were long, but honestly better than I expected. We flew American Airlines from Waterloo to Chicago, then Air Serbia from Chicago to Belgrade, followed by a short flight to Tivat, Montenegro. From there, a driver picked us up and took us across the ferry to the small coastal town where we rented a home through VRBO.
One thing that helped tremendously was timing. The overnight flight lined up surprisingly well with the boys’ normal bedtime back in Iowa. I also brought Flyaway beds that turned the airplane seats into little sleeping spaces, and both boys stretched out and slept for a good portion of the flight.
But more than anything, what has stood out to me here is how kind people are toward children.
Traveling internationally with two small boys was one of my biggest anxieties, especially during inevitable hunger meltdowns, loud moments, or bursts of chaotic energy. In the United States, I often feel pressure to apologize constantly for children simply existing in public spaces.
Here, every apology has been met with some version of:
“No problem. They’re children.”
People have waved us to the front of lines, smiled at the boys in restaurants, and shown a level of patience and warmth that honestly caught me off guard.
Another surprise has been shopping.
Back home, I spend so much time reading labels and paying premium prices for products with cleaner ingredients or organic options. Here, I’m finding many everyday items made with simpler ingredients and fewer additives without the inflated “health food” markup. The language barrier definitely makes shopping slower, but Google Translate’s camera feature has become one of my favorite travel tools.
For now, life here is fairly simple.
We wake up slowly, make breakfast, and leave the balcony doors open to the warm Adriatic air while the boys play nearby. Some days we walk to the boat to check on progress, take inventory, or make provisioning lists. Most days are spent at the beach playing in the sand. Occasionally, Wade stays with the boys while I wander through shops carrying home only what I can fit in my arms because we don’t have a car here.
And honestly? I forgot how enjoyable simple shopping can feel when you’re walking through small local stores instead of rushing through giant parking lots and supermarkets.
Of course, not everything is easy.
Shipping items into Montenegro is surprisingly complicated. Since the country isn’t part of the European Union, importing packages often requires customs paperwork and brokers, which has made ordering supplies difficult.
And boat work is taking longer than expected.
Originally, we hoped to make a fast push toward the Caribbean and possibly the ABC islands before hurricane season. Now, we may end up spending more time exploring the Mediterranean instead.
But we’re trying not to plan too far ahead.
Right now, life feels very much like a lesson in letting things unfold as they’re meant to.
So this is where we are:
living out of suitcases,
raising little boys abroad,
waiting on boat projects,
walking everywhere,
carrying groceries home by hand,
and preparing for a voyage we can’t completely predict yet.
And somehow, despite all the uncertainty, it feels like the beginning of something really special for our family.
So please stay tuned.
With little hands constantly tugging at me, I may not write as often as I’d like, but this time, I do hope to keep writing things down.
P.S. Please excuse the website. It desperately needs an overhaul, and I’ll get to it eventually… probably sometime between provisioning lists and snack requests.
Cheers,
Sara
