Leaving the Safe Harbor: The Risks and Rewards of Raising a Family on a Boat

International Impact Book Awards 2021, WINNER (Family and Travel categories)
Firebird Book Awards 2021, first place WINNER (Travel category)
Hollywood Book Festival Awards 2021, Honorable Mention (Biography/Autobiography/Memoir)

Sometimes life is unpredictable and there’s no time like now to live adventurously.

A couple of average high-school sweethearts from middle-class America go off to college, get married, follow all the rules, play it safe, and pursue the American Dream. When they find themselves boxed in by their predictable life and looking for adventure, they decide to revisit their dreams of youth, abandon the conventional path, and leave the safety of suburbia to live aboard a sailboat with their five children. Yes, five.

But to turn their shared dream into reality, they must surmount discomfort and difficulty, face their fears and insecurities, and work together to make big decisions. Leaving the Safe Harbor charts the journey of the author and her family from suburban Atlanta to coastal Florida to distant islands as seen from the deck of a catamaran. It shares the highs and lows of living in close quarters, and of raising five children while homeschooling bravely on a boat.

You’ll travel through space and time and explore the metaphysical landscape of hardship, love, grace, and spiritual growth. Imagine yourself in the author's shoes and contemplate how you’d handle these difficult and humorous situations. It will awaken your own desires to follow your dreams and dig deeply into the meaning and purpose of your life. You may be willing to overcome excuses you’ve made when you see how others succeeded despite obstacles.

Leaving the Safe Harbor shows us more than seafaring stories or what it’s like to go sailing with kids. Each chapter explores a different sailing idiom and the character traits developed by challenges and adventures. It shows that conflict can be handled through grace, how failures can lead to future successes, how hardship can teach us gratitude and help us find inner strength. It reveals the trade-offs when a family prioritizes relationships and experiences over material things and a so-called normal life. Living close to nature enriches the author’s spiritual life. And the ocean teaches life lessons, including how to be flexible, disciplined, patient, and open to new experiences. Most importantly, Leaving the Safe Harbor shows us how love, perseverance, and hard work can turn an idea into a reality.

The couple returns to the United States after a decade of travel, their children now on the cusp of adulthood, and discovers that they are no longer the same people who left the house with the white picket fence.

Anything is possible.

Even a neurotic suburban housewife and her workaholic husband can leave their home and minivan behind and homeschool five children on a boat.

Tanya Hackney graduated with a B.A. from Middlebury College in 1997, with a major in English and double minor in French and Education. She taught kindergarten in Atlanta, Georgia, then she homeschooled her five children while living full time aboard the sailboat, Take Two. She learned to sail in 2007 and did the coursework for ASA101 and ASA103 after attending a women's sailing seminar in St. Petersburg, Florida. She's lived aboard, traveled, and written for the sailing blog www.taketwosailing.com for more than a decade. Tanya has always had a bad case of wanderlust, taking countless road trips as a child, spending a semester abroad during college, and honeymooning in Central America. In her free time, she plays the ukulele, paints landscapes, and kayaks. She wrote her first story at age six, but Leaving the Safe Harbor is her first published full-length work.