A Dream Doesn't Have to Be Finished to Change Your Life

Dream Maker had something I couldn't stop thinking about.

Her full keel.

The openness of her salon.

The curves of her deck.

The craftsmanship of her woodwork.

And those distinctive windows across the stern that gave her just enough of the appearance of an old pirate ship.

Underneath everything that had deteriorated was a boat built for something larger.

I saw a boat that could take me anywhere and everywhere I might ever want to go.

And almost immediately, I knew I didn't simply want to repair her.

I wanted to preserve the craftsmanship and character that made her special while completely modernizing the systems that would carry her into the future.

Even before I owned her, I knew I wanted electric propulsion.

I imagined a restored and modernized Dream Maker capable of carrying me through the rest of my life's journey.

I wasn't looking at a finished boat.

I was imagining the rest of my life.

I knew Dream Maker needed work when I bought her.

I just didn't understand how much.

My plan was ambitious, but at the time it seemed reasonable: work hard, get her back in the water within six months, and have her ready to sail the world in less than a year.

Then we opened the deck.

I'd been fortunate to find Dave Horsley, a gifted woodworker who would eventually help restore much of Dream Maker's deck.

The decks had felt soft when I first walked aboard, so I knew repairs were coming.

I didn't know what was underneath.

Dave cut into one of the damaged sections and exposed the wooden core sandwiched inside the fiberglass.

Or what was left of it.

Years of water intrusion had destroyed the core. In places, the wood had deteriorated so completely that it had essentially turned to mud.

I remember looking at that opened deck and realizing, perhaps for the first time, the true scale of what I'd taken on.

Dream Maker wasn't going back into the water in six months.

She didn't need a collection of repairs.

She needed to be rebuilt.

For a while, progress came steadily.

Then life changed.

In April 2025, my financial circumstances changed dramatically.

The resources available for the restoration slowed, and so did the work.

Eventually, progress nearly came to a stop.

The major pieces of the new propulsion system are still waiting to be installed. The boat has been prepared for them. The plan remains.

And I keep working.

Just more slowly.

There would be an easy way to tell this story in hindsight—to turn every setback into a lesson and every delay into some perfectly timed piece of wisdom.

That's not what happened.

I wanted Dream Maker finished.

I still do.

But something unexpected happened during all those hours working aboard a boat that couldn't yet take me anywhere.

I started traveling anyway.

Restoring Dream Maker gave me a lot of time to imagine her finished.

I imagined standing at the helm.

I imagined passages between islands.

I imagined Caribbean anchorages, unfamiliar harbors, quiet beaches, storms, friendships, discoveries, and the kind of adventures that begin when you stop knowing exactly what is going to happen next.

The real Dream Maker remained on land.

In my mind, she was already sailing.

Around the same time, I was reading a lot of sailing books. I especially enjoyed sailing fiction, and while working my way through the Master and Commander series, I began looking for something similar set in the modern world.

A contemporary sailing adventure.

I found countless memoirs, cruising accounts, and other nonfiction books about life at sea.

But surprisingly little fiction.

For centuries, stories of the sea had invited readers into unknown worlds. They inspired people to wonder what existed beyond the horizon—to imagine ships, distant islands, exploration, danger, discovery, and adventure.

I wanted to read a story that did that today.

One where the boat was modern.

The places were real.

The history was real.

The sailing felt real.

But the adventure could still make someone close the book and wonder:

What if I went?

I couldn't find quite the story I was looking for.

So an idea came to me.

Maybe I could write it.

There was only one problem.

Never in my life had I imagined I could be an author.

I didn't know whether I could write a novel.

I had never thought of myself as a writer.

I certainly didn't have some lifelong ambition to become an author.

But I had an idea.

So in June 2025, I started writing.

The boat I had spent years imagining underway finally left the dock—just not in the way I'd expected.

On the page, Dream Maker sailed into the Caribbean.

She carried Junior and Faidh from island to island. Real places became the setting for fictional adventures. History became mystery. Sailing became exploration. And the voyages I'd imagined during countless hours of restoration finally had somewhere to go.

That first story became Sailing Dream Maker — The Taíno Amulets.

The book began as a way to explore the places and adventures I had been imagining while the real Dream Maker remained on land. The Introduction describes the book as the beginning of those imagined journeys.

And somewhere in the process, something happened that I never expected.

I became an author.

When I first saw Dream Maker, I looked beyond what she was and imagined what she might become.

Years later, I sat down in front of a blank page and did something remarkably similar.

I didn't know whether I could rebuild a boat of this scale.

I started.

I didn't know whether I could write a novel.

I started.

Neither journey has followed the plan I originally drew for it.

And neither is finished.

Perhaps that's why the name Dream Maker has come to mean so much more to me than the name painted on the side of a boat.

Because dreams rarely arrive finished.

Sometimes they begin as an old sailboat sitting on land.

Sometimes as an idea you're not sure you're capable of pursuing.

Sometimes the first step leads somewhere completely different than you expected.

But you have to begin making them before you can discover where they might take you.