My dad, who had loaded my family onto the boat in 2000, when I was 12, and lit the fuse on our new vagabond life of seafaring adventure. The duration of this excursion, or experiment, as he sometimes described it, was undetermined, which he explained was a critical component of our travels. The idea was to live more fully in each moment, connect more profoundly with each other and the world around us, and explore a variety of extremes in self-reliance.

I was homeschooled from the time I was 12, often studying with other groups of kids who also lived on boats with their families, or sometimes backpackers who lived aboard our boat, where they acquired miscellaneous projects to earn their stay. One of those projects, depending on any given backpacker’s disposition, energy, and acumen, was my education for two to four hours a day. Under the mentorship of a rotating, kaleidoscoping cast of travelers, I learned how to help someone recover from hypothermia in Mexico, how to backpedal my way out of youthful, urban squabbles in Colombia, how to spear fish in Panama, and how to hand-roll tobacco on the Rock of Gibraltar, all hodgepodged in with other miscellaneous life skills. Throughout that time at sea, from the ages of 12 to 17, a common denominator across innumerable lessons, was the power of a captivating story, which is the knowledge that has, in perpetuity, informed all aspects of my professional life.

As an extracurricular yet core component of my homeschooling, my dad, who was, in addition to being a avid sailor, a technical writer and sociologist, required that I either write or illustrate a snippet of words or drawings on paper that highlighted at least one experience each day. While I did not write or draw every single day, I did develop a creative muscle through the attempted regimen to produce stories, and to channel my own excursions, relationships, aspirations, and mutinies, into something that resembled artistic expression. I found, even at that very young age, that the intersection of craft and discipline, is a space that cultivates great satisfaction, deeper reflections, and life enrichment. I did not, at that time, set my sights on a career as a writer, or filmmaker, or any other variety of storytelling, largely because the majority of my daily experiences was entrenched in moments, the people in front of me, and practical problem-solving, as my dad had intended. I was also, generally, too busy attempting to make friends in new cities, learn new languages, and keep our migratory sailboat—named Songline—navigating safely while careening down storm swell in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, or puttering under engine power through narrow passages between coral reef.

It was not until my family set up a new home at the docks in the port of Barcelona, Spain—the summer of 2002—and enrolled me at a local high school, situated in the north side of the decadent, sprawling city, that I discovered my pathway into journalism. I wrote for the school newspaper at the Benjamin Franklin International School, where my stories about travel and goings on about town , through the eyes of my 16-year-old self, were published in both Spanish and English. It was a catalyzing course and laid the foundation for my pursuit of a journalism career several years later, after I’d returned to the USA and began my college career at California State University, Chico.

Since graduating from Chico State, I’ve worked for daily, weekly, and bi-weekly newspapers and a quarterly surf magazine, called Santa Cruz Waves. In 2016 I hurled myself into the world of video production, which lead me to become a co-founder of a creative production studio called Swan Dive Media, where we make documentaries and brand stories for a wide variety of clientele. The world has changed by orders of magnitude since those days of jotting down notes with pen and paper while floating across the Caribbean aboard Songline, with the birth of social media, accessibility to content creation tools, and constant enhancement in web tech capabilities, but the reality remains that every tool in the kit will remain just that—a tool—without the core fundamentals of powerful, authentic storytelling.