Voyage of the Maiatla with the Naked Canadian: One Family's Mexican Odyssey

The Voyage of the Maiatla with the Naked Canadian candidly chronicles the true life adventures of a family of four that set forth on a 52-foot sailboat to circumnavigate the world. The life-long dream of the head of the household seizes the family's imagination and together they sail off on a voyage of discovery and often humorous misadventure. The reader experiences what it is like on a daily basis to live the life of a "sea gypsy" with a pair of precocious children and an initially apprehensive spouse as crew. The book covers the first year of the voyage, traversing the coast from Canada to Mexico. The story includes being anchored in San Francisco during the assault on the World Trade Center and experiencing the Golden Gate city gripped in fear. With chilling detail, the author describes scuba diving in the Great White shark-infested waters of the Farallon Islands off the coast of California.
The family's life on the water includes cruisers' music festivals, exploring tropical deserted islands, and a Baja desert road trip that entails staring down the barrel of a loaded machinegun on more than one occasion. Despite their apparent carefree existence, the tragic destruction of several vessels and the loss of several friends soberly remind them of the potentially dangerous life they are leading upon the sea. The other crazy cruisers that they meet along the way; the rich and famous, the poets, paupers and musicians, whose own stories and lust for life often border on the bizarre, unexpectedly inject spice and color into their lives as they wander the world under sail.

This is book one of two of the Naked Canadian Cruising Series.