Feb 01, 2022 8:00 AM
Janis Couvreux
Sail Cowabunga: A Family's Ten Years at Sea

From Bordeaux, France to San Francisco, California: Janis' talk follows a Franco-American couple and their two young sons across the Atlantic Ocean and into a 10-year journey overseas. Through their adventures and misadventures, tragedies, and glories across four continents, the Couvreux Family rarely had a dull moment living on the water. Janis chronicles in vivid and lively detail how they fended off a midnight intruder, sailed to the microscopic St. Peter and St. Paul rocks on the equator, explored the jungles of French Guiana and Devil's Island, and sailed through Cuba during the turmoil of the late 80s. Their adventure was not without hardship, however, as Janis recounts battling medical emergencies that required sending her husband across the globe for treatment (twice), leaving her to single-handedly orchestrate a Panama Canal passage amid pre-war chaos. While living in the vclose quarters of their 42-foot sailboat, the Cowabunga, the Couvreux family was able to maintain sanity and a normal routine of cooking, schooling and sleeping at sea, knowing all the while that something unexpected might be waiting around the next peninsula.