The couple left Seattle in , selling off most of their belongings and putting their home up for sale. They hoped to use the money from the sale to help finance the adventure, but the economic downturn devalued their house so much that they decided to rent it out.
The rent covered the mortgage, but not taxes or insurance, so they had to delve into savings, something that frightened them. Behan was working for a software startup in Seattle and Jamie ran a small medical device import business. They say they had saved about five years worth of income to go cruising, although the plan was to be gone for just two or three years. When they finally decided to make the leap, though, they say they knew it was time, that the frenetic pace of life with two wage earners in the household had already taken a toll.
In , they bought a Stevens 47 sailboat, nearly 50 feet long with two sleeping cabins and a kitchen. They christened it Totem. Both Behan and Jamie had grown up sailing, so they knew their way around a sailboat, but it still took months for the whole family to develop the skills they felt were required before setting out.
Along the way, they have homeschooled their three children, Niall 17 , Siobhan 12 and Mairen Teaching has transcended traditional ABCs though.
The whole family has learned critical lessons about self and survival. Behan says that while they were planning their new life, many friends and family members questioned the move and cautioned them against it.
But over time, they came to realize that they had made the right choice, even if few people at the time agreed. As their uncertainties melted away, a rising confidence in their own decision-making began to percolate into other aspects of their lives. The Giffords say that each new country they visit offers a brand new environment, requiring the family to embrace a new culture, a new language, another way of looking at life.
That has bred a level of adaptability that the parents believe will serve their children well into adulthood. Their ability to adapt helped immensely when it came to formulating a home school curriculum that best took advantage of their new lifestyle.
Initially, they looked into popular homeschooling options like Calvert Education. But the program turned out to be wrong for them. The curriculum comes in a big box, one for each child, which they found burdensome on a small boat. Our lifestyle is like a living field trip. So they dropped Calvert and developed their own curriculum using resources online and talking at length with other cruisers. The children are avid readers because, well, what else is there to do at sea for days on end?
While initially they had dozens of books on board, they slowly transitioned to reading on four Kindles which are loaded up with ebooks. While at sea, they have only enough bandwidth through a satellite phone to download text-only email. One indulgence which Behan was particularly adamant about was having a set of encyclopedias on board, which to most of us, in the age of Google and Wikipedia, seems quaint. Jamie was initially against having the large tomes aboard because of space constraints, but now says it was a great decision.
Over the first year or two, the family came to appreciate how much more valuable the real world can be as a classroom than the traditional four walls and a blackboard most of us grew up with.
On a reef in French Polynesia, where the couple spent weeks living and snorkeling, they brought scientists aboard fellow cruisers with PhDs who would school the children in marine biology. A book with pictures of a thriving reef, or a dying one, is no match for the real thing. In every new country, the family tries to learn the language. They have picked up Spanish and a smattering of others.
Perhaps of equal value, they have also learned for themselves how dramatically humans are impacting the globe. Some areas they have visited are virtual cesspools of pollution. Several spots around Southeast Asia are so ravaged by garbage and untreated sewage that entire swaths of ocean have become dead zones, literally bereft of life.
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And remember to be careful on the internet! Aerodynamic forces on sails depend on wind speed and direction and the speed and direction of the craft. The direction that the craft is traveling with respect to the true wind the wind direction and speed over the surface is called the "point of sail". The speed of the craft at a given point of sail contributes to the apparent wind V A —the wind speed and direction as measured on the moving craft. Depending on the alignment of the sail with the apparent wind, lift or drag may be the predominant propulsive component.
Total aerodynamic force also resolves into a forward, propulsive, driving force—resisted by the medium through or over which the craft is passing e. For apparent wind angles aligned with the entry point of the sail, the sail acts as an airfoil and lift is the predominant component of propulsion. For apparent wind angles behind the sail, lift diminishes and drag increases as the predominant component of propulsion.
For a given true wind velocity over the surface, a sail can propel a craft to a higher speed, on points of sail when the entry point of the sail is aligned with the apparent wind, than it can with the entry point not aligned, because of a combination of the diminished force from airflow around the sail and the diminished apparent wind from the velocity of the craft. Because of low friction over the surface and high speeds over the ice that create high apparent wind speeds for most points of sail, iceboats can derive power from lift further off the wind than displacement boats.
Sail facts for kids Kids Encyclopedia Facts. Sail rigs. Crab claw sail on a Carolinian wa outrigger ship. Lateen-rigged dhow. Square rigged frigate. Bermuda-rigged yawl. Sailing hydrofoil catamaran with wingsail.
Main pages: Square rig and Fore-and-aft rig. Main page: Ship History. Spinnaker cross-section trimmed for a broad reach showing air flow. Spinnaker cross-section with following apparent wind, showing air flow. All content from Kiddle encyclopedia articles including the article images and facts can be freely used under Attribution-ShareAlike license, unless stated otherwise.
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