SAILING MISS LON STAR

My bilge pump stopped working, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. After three days of chasing electrical gremlins, I finally surrendered and wandered into the marina office looking for help. As I scanned a wall of faded business cards, a man approached me and asked what I needed.

“An electrician,” I said flatly.

He perked up and declared he could help—he had just rewired his entire boat. Skeptical, I agreed. An hour later he arrived with a small tool bag and a string of questions. The first one—“Which one is your negative bus bar?”—was the moment my hopes for a quick fix dissolved.

His questions got more technical. Mine got more patient. Secretly I was hoping he would just leave.  Eventually, we dog-legged into sea stories. That’s when he stopped, looked at me, and asked:

“So… what’s your story?”

He hadn’t expected me to know anything—let alone have salty tales about sailing East Africa or rebuilding engine parts with JB Weld and wax paper on a deserted Bahamian island. But his question stuck with me.

What is my story?

The life of a person is a lot like a snowflake—built from tiny shapes stacked over time. The people, the heartbreaks, the wild leaps of faith, the moments you swear you can’t keep going but somehow you do… all of it layers into something intricate and unique.

So which shapes, which stories, do I start with to give you a glimpse of who I am and what my life has become?

I grew up in a small country town in the California valley, three and a half hours east of the ocean. My childhood was spent taming animals—large, small, and everything in between. The closest thing I knew to sailing was Swiss Family Robinson, and their voyage didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

But I had other dreams. I wanted to be a journalist. I imagined myself traveling the world, writing about far-off places and the extraordinary people who lived in them. Then college arrived, and dyslexia stood firmly between me and a newsroom career. So I shifted my sights. Wild On E and MTV were my new Olympus, and Brooke Burke became my imaginary mentor.

I continued to write constantly—like my life depended on it. At twenty, when Playboy’s The Girls Next Door exploded in popularity, I had a lightning-strike thought:

“I’ll pose for Playboy, like Brooke Burke did, and then I’ll find my way to the Travel Channel.”

So I went to a casting call. Four hundred women.  Somehow, unbelievably, I was on a plane to LA.

My modeling career was short-lived. I met my oldest daughter’s father, and my life changed. You can read that story here. The next four years brought me my daughter Bianca, my son Blake, and an unexpected passion for being behind the camera. Through it all, my love for documenting, exploring, and writing heldfast.

In 2014, I moved to Austin, Texas with my two young kids, searching for a fresh start and room for my photography business to grow beyond our small Northern California town.

Then I met a man.
I fell in love. He asked, “Do you want to sell everything and go treasure hunting in the Bahamas?”

I said yes.

I told myself it was the perfect time to finish my book. The photography alone would be incredible. And what an adventure for my kids—seeing the world by boat. There was only one problem: I had never set foot on a boat in the ocean.

But I’m nothing if not adaptable. With my kids in tow, I took the leap.

My first time on a boat in the ocean was the day I moved aboard. It was electric. We made our way from Kemah, Texas through the ICW to Florida. I had never felt more alive. It didn’t take long for us to realize we could go farther—much farther—on the wind. So we bought a sailboat, and I fell in love all over again.

My book was coming along. I started reaching out to publishers, and some showed real interest. Until the same question kept coming up:

“What’s your social media following?”

I barely had a Facebook page.

The publisher of my dreams let me down gently, telling me my story was strong—but without an audience, the book wouldn’t sell.

So I treated it as a solvable problem. That’s the moment the YouTube channel Sailing Miss Lone Star was born. Making little films of our  journey added an indescribable layer of art to our lives. It pulled me closer to the dream of my younger self: traveling the world and telling stories in my own voice, through my own lens.

But life has a way of throwing curveballs.

As our adventure unfolded, my sailing partner—and now husband—lost his battle with PTSD. He took his own life. I talk about it in a video, so I won’t go into the details again here. Even now, after all this time it’s hard to retell.

My world shattered. I kept trying to gather the pieces. Everything I had hoped for, dreamed of, and believed was waiting for me… disappeared. One of the most difficult things was that I had lost trust in myself. How could I have not seen any of this coming?

My world crumbled, and I tried to piece it back together. Everything I had built—my hopes, my dreams, my sense of security—had been attached to the future we planned together.

But I refused to give up.

So I bought a one-dollar boat—honestly someone should have paid me to take her—and taught myself how to rebuild it from the keel up. Sometimes I held things together with nothing more than glue and determination. I learned from every mistake, every breakdown, every blunder. And somewhere along the way…I became a sailor.

Eventually, I bought what my kids lovingly named “the pirate ship”—a 51-foot classic ketch with lines as wild and beautiful as the life we were trying to rebuild.

The story between losing my husband and buying this big, beautiful pirate ship is winding at best—marked by moments of deep pride and moments I’m not so proud of. But that polarity shaped me. It carved out perspective, grit, and a kind of courage I didn’t know I had.

Through all of that sadness and hardship, I never gave up on love. I refused to let my failures and losses harden my heart.

In the summer of 2023 I found myself in love once again. This time with a handsome Latin man born of the surf and swell (you can read more about that here). By the fall of 2024 I had my second daughter Violet. She was born in Escazu Costa Rica and a new story began.

Three women and a baby on a classic sailboat, heading south toward the Panama Canal— embarking on the adventure of a lifetime.