sailor, writer, nomad
That’s me. Christine Kling. The sailing writer.
The one in the blue dress trying to look oh so sophisticated at age 15.
Thankfully, my family instilled in me a love of travel and sailing. Mom and dad were both teachers, but they took us camping every chance they got. Then we started with rental boats in at the Balboa Pavillion in Newport Beach, and we finally graduated to our own boat.
The writing part came from me. I finished high school early so I could travel to France as a foreign exchange student, imagining myself a female Hemingway as I scribbled my letters home on blue aerograms. When I returned, I started, then quit college, studied in Mexico for three months, then rode my bicycle 1000 miles from San Diego to La Paz, Mexico on the newly opened Baja highway. There, I signed on as cook aboard a Baltic Trader named Sylvia for the sail from La Paz back up to Long Beach. I sold my first story to Bicycling! magazine about that trip.
During the next four decades, there were so many different boats, countries, oceans crossed, adventures and a new family. I met my first husband in Maui in 1975 and jumped aboard his boat to sail upwind to the Marquesas and on down the Milk Run to New Zealand. We sailed (again upwind) back to California and built a 55-foot cutter from a bare hull and sailed her down to the Caribbean where we ran her in the charter business. I wrote for the sailing magazines, finally went back to college, and ended up with an MFA in creative writing. And now I have published eight novels.
In 2013, I was singlehandedly sailing my Caliber 33 in Florida, writing fiction full-time, and contributing to a blog called Write on the Water. After a 20-year marriage, and raising my son, I had been single for 18 years. Life was good. I didn’t think it could get any better. Then a fellow singlehander who was located in Fiji commented on a post I wrote. We started an email correspondence that quickly turned into Skype calls. We had our first date when I flew to Fiji to join him as crew on the 2000+ mile passage to Majuro in the Marshall Islands. We got married nine months later, and I made his 52-foot steel cutter my new home. Don’t let anyone tell you there’s no such thing as falling in love again at age 60!
After sailing the South Pacific for a few years, we sold that boat and delivered her to New Zealand for the new owners. We started on the years of design and construction that led us to be the proud owners of the 24-meter aluminum ice-class expedition vessel, Möbius, launched in 2021 in Antalya, Turkey. We have dreams of high latitude sailing. This newsletter will be filled with the tales of our travels in the Mediterranean and beyond.
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