Welcome Aboard!

Hello and welcome aboard Schooner Kiva! We are a normal Canadian family who has chosen to live a not so normal life off-grid on the ocean for the past 15 years. Neal has lived onboard one boat or another since his teens and I married into the live-aboard life in 2007. We have since added our onboard security system, Bella, our Dachshund. Then in 2015 we finally completed our family with the arrival of our son Decker. Neal works in health care and I choose to leave my professional career to raise our son. Living onboard a boat has allowed us to live on just one income.

I must admit hesitating to describe us as "normal". I can actually hear family and friends laughing when they read that. I don't really know why, but others have always called our life "exciting", "crazy", "weird", "unbelievable ". We approach life with a different perspective. What does that mean you ask? Well, firstly we do all of our own work as we can't afford to pay someone else to do the work for us. Secondly, we have the attitude of "what is the worst that can happen?". If we can live with the answer to that question, then we will generally go ahead with whatever it is.

Let me give you an example. We bought and converted a 60 foot 1912 wood seiner fishboat when we were first married. We had a fridge which suddenly stopped working. We couldn't afford a new one, so it was off to the repair shop. We have never lived on a dock, only out on a mooring bouy. We wrestled the fridge out to the back deck, rigged up some lifting straps to our hydraulic boom winch (big powerful lifting hook for those people not familiar). Lift up....dangle the fridge over the stern of the fish boat...and lower into the 14 foot Boston Whaler dingy we had. Strap the fridge down, fire up the motor and away we go.

Here is where our options came in. Option 1: wrestle the fridge out of the Boston Whaler at the dock, up the ramp (which could range from flat to extremely steep depending on the tide), up and into the back of a pick up truck, into town, load fridge out of truck and carry into the repair shop. Then repeat the performance the next day for the return trip. Or we could do Option 2: drive Boston Whaler to the boat launch, load boat and fridge onto boat trailer, drive the whole thing into town, have repair guy fix the fridge while it was still strapped into the boat. Repeat in reverse the following day. We chose option 2. A friend later asked how our fridge repair went, yet we had never mentioned anything about it to him. How did he know? He has seen a fridge strapped into a boat loaded on a boat trailer outside a fridge repair shop. He knew it had to be us! And we had been borrowing a friend's Boston Whaler, so he couldn't have even recognized the boat! That is what I mean about a different approach to life.

We have since moved onto S.V. Kiva, our 55 foot ferro-cement Samson schooner sailboat. The boat had been essentially abandoned on a dock for ten years with no heat or airflow. She had considerable mold and some wood rot issues. However, underneath that was solid teak and mahogany. The outside was covered in shredded plastic and green slime. Underneath that was heavy duty stainless steel rigging, a professionally built extra thick cement hull, teak wheelhouse and two aluminum masts and booms.

One benefit of having very little money is that you develop the ability to see past the dirt and into the potential. That potential is what we are fulfilling now. We invite you to follow along with us as we rebuild our home, learn to sail the boat and explore the incredible coastline of British Columbia, Canada...and eventually the world.