I first met Ken three days after I met his mother Suzanne. He'd been on a Boy Scout camping trip and probably had no inkling that his world would soon change. Within a few months, it became apparent that I was going to be around for a long time, and we'd need to bond as a family. Suzanne and I accepted this fairly easily, but Ken was less excited by the prospect.

I'd been a boater for most of my adult life and trying to figure out how to live on a boat since the late 1970s. Suzanne had lived on a mission ship in the South Pacific for a year in college. Ken had never been on a boat larger than a kayak. It was a match made in heaven.

FRANK MUMMERTKen did not take to sailing immediately, but he was a good sport about living aboard.

In the few years that followed, I watched as a boy became a man. Much of that transition took place in the forward berth of Rockhopper, our floating home. And what a transition it was.

SHAKY START

The story starts when Ken was 15, and we bought our first family boat, a 25–foot MacGregor sailboat. My sailboat experience had been limited to drifting downwind, then getting off and walking the boat back upwind. I knew the rudiments of tacking upwind, but theory was definitely different than practice. The MacGregor taught Suzanne and I how to sail – mostly by learning what not to do.

Usually, sailing involved us sitting in the cockpit, becalmed, trying to figure out where the wind was. Sometime trips became vocabulary lessons in profanity, especially when I would attempt to start the 10–year–old outboard so that we could motor to where the wind just had to be. Occasionally, cruises would become white–knuckle rides as we tried to figure out how to get back out of the wind without all of us going overboard, losing the boat and all of our possessions in the process. Oddly, this did not endear Ken to sailing.

Ken was the sort of kid who had a healthy inner worldview. While he could run cross–country track when he chose and had a small cadre of close friends, he was perfectly happy curled up in a corner with a book. Now, doing the latter is a pleasant pastime on a small boat underway, unless your spot to curl up is in the V–berth, which is almost guaranteed to produce nausea. Despite urging to the contrary, almost every time Ken went out on the MacGregor, he would find himself leaning over the side and trying to remember when he had eaten that!

FRANK MUMMERTThe author and his wife celebrating Christmas.

When we decided to take a sailing vacation in Florida, Ken was less than thrilled. Although we had chartered a boat that was almost twice the size of our own, and in spite of our repeated assurances that he wouldn't get seasick if he stayed on deck while reading, he treated us as if we were sending him to summer camp in Hell. There were several pleasant activities, especially snorkeling. But the emergency re–anchorings, the nights spent sweltering because we didn't find the hatch screens until the last day, and a really amusing (if you weren't Ken) incident where he sat on the flush–mounted GPS antenna and unknowingly put the GPS, chartplotter and autopilot all off–line made the trip closer to his original expectations than we wanted to admit.

LEAVING LAND, LIVING ONBOARD

So, imagine Ken's feelings when we told him that we'd found the perfect boat to live on. We had intended to sell the house the year Ken left for college. As with all good plans, it quickly went down the bilge. We found the slip in January of Ken's junior year of high school, and the boat around Easter.

FRANK MUMMERTAt Ken's Army going-away party, his friends and family gave him a signed shirt with a flag-waving penguin, to remind him of his time on Rockhopper.

Being good parents, we told Ken that the final decision would be his. Moving onboard would involve him changing high schools for his senior year. We understood that this could be traumatic, and if he felt it would be too much to ask, we were willing to pass on this boat. Being a good son, Ken told us that he would bite the bullet.

Of course, he knew that we'd feel guilty about making him move and therefore help him visit his friends, paying for gas and tolls. Also, the school he was leaving was a hotbed of high–school drama. The new school was much more laid back and emphasized life skills more than getting into a top–ten college, a problem that we were pretty sure Ken wasn't going to have.

The cherry on top of the deal was that Ken only needed two classes to graduate. The old school prohibited students from leaving the grounds early, so he would have had to take four "elective" classes to fill his day. The new school was much more understanding and even helped him get an off–campus job that he could report to after he completed his two morning classes. He got course credit for filing and copying.

BOYS WILL BE BOYS

Ken's reputation preceded him. The day he and Suzanne went to enroll, the entire office staff wanted to meet the "kid who lived on a boat." This was Ken's first brush with his newfound celebrity. Teachers, counselors and students knew him, unusual for a kid used to blending into the pack. Periodically, kids and even teachers would show up just to see his home.

Ken moved aboard just before Labor Day weekend of 2005 and quickly turned the forward cabin into his personal space. It featured single berths along the port and starboard sides, with a hanging locker under the starboard bunk. Ken took the port berth and turned the starboard one into a storage area for electronic gear and DVDs in tubs and binders. A television appeared at the foot of his bunk, and new video–game consoles showed up. Books covered most flat surfaces. Had we ever gotten into a real storm, it would have looked like the science–fiction section of a bookstore had been through a blender.

FRANK MUMMERTAt the one-year anniversary of buying their boat, the author and his wife rechristened it Rockhopper.

Of course, Ken being a teenage boy, other, less–healthy things also made their way into the forward cabin, and periodic forays by his mother uncovered food–encrusted plates, fast–food bags and piles of laundry that were evolving into a life of their own. We tried to explain the concepts of clean shipboard living, but we were rewarded with the typical infuriating scenario: the teenager responding that things would change, despite it being obvious the requests hadn't penetrated his shell.

BOY BECOMES MAN

In his last year at the old school, Ken had taken an extended course in firefighting and emergency medical services, which resulted in him qualifying as a county firefighter/EMT. This experience changed his career goals from a nebulous want to "work with animals" to a directed desire to join the military as a medic or firefighter.

Meetings with various recruiters soon had him focused on the Army, despite parental urgings to consider the Navy. Memories of seasickness colored his decision, in my opinion. We tried to explain that the "big boats" don't have this problem, but he wasn't willing to take the chance.

As Ken worked his way through the recruiting system, his fame continued to precede him. His recruiters, in meeting with us on the boat to discuss his options, were fascinated by his lifestyle. One sergeant went so far as to express the opinion that Ken was the first person he knew who actually would gain space when he entered the service. Ken enlisted in the Army, with his mother's approval, in the late fall of his senior year, and he started meeting with the recruiters on a regular basis to prepare him for his transition to military life.

Now the two "old people" who lived with him weren't the only ones evaluating his grades and his attitude – people he actually respected did, too. The changes were obvious and pleasant. Clothes tended to put themselves away, plates found their way to the galley sink before they became science experiments, and dinner discussions began to center on world events rather than video games. We considered keeping him – just about the time we began to realize that we would be losing him.

FRANK MUMMERTKen in his military fatigues, ready for the next step in life.

Although we lived onboard for his entire senior year, Ken actually got underway with us only three times. The first was a surprise trip to Busch Gardens Williamsburg, the amusement park in southeastern Virginia. It's just off the north shore of the James River and next to a marina. Without telling him the destination, we shanghaied Ken one weekend in late October and forced him to go have fun with us for a day sail. As the day lengthened into late afternoon, he kept glancing nervously at the chartplotter and worrying that we might make him stay with us at anchor. Memories of Florida nights and mosquito flocks were rising when Suzanne pointed out the tops of the roller coasters in the fading sunlight. Somehow, for a kid who got seasick with little prompting, the idea of being flipped upside down and dropped six flights at high speed was a treat. And as we crawled into our berths sometime around midnight, he observed that there might possibly be some benefit to being able to move your home.

The second time was the James River Parade of Lights for Christmas. We'd decorated the boat with enough lights to put a serious drain on the 3,500–watt generator we'd bought for the occasion, and we'd invited several friends to ride along. Ken also had a friend aboard, and the two served as deckhands, handling lines and reporting on floating objects. Unfortunately, a problem with the hydraulic transmission delayed our departure with the parade, so we got underway after the rest of the boats were already a mile down river. We had to run at full power to catch up.

Ken and his buddy acted as the bow lookouts, standing in the freezing breeze and staring into the darkness; they decided that one would remain on the bow while the other ran back to the helm to report on possible problems. Ken watched that night, tears streaming down his face from the wind as he shouted and pointed. When we finally caught up with the parade, he stumbled back into the cockpit, frozen. He quickly gulped down two mugs of steaming hot chocolate and looked over at me. "Well, that was fun," he said. I started to snap at him for his attitude when I realized he meant it. Standing on the bow in the cold, making sure nothing bad happened to us, had been an opportunity to do something good for the family. I relaxed and realized I would miss his help in the future.

The last time we took the boat out, we did it just for the exercise. Ken helped with lines and fenders, but he spent most of his time sitting in the cockpit or on the bow with his mother, talking quietly. As I watched him from the helm, I knew that this was the end of this part of our life. The next time we went out with Ken, he'd be a passenger, along for the ride but no longer a permanent crewmember. It was normal: Kids grow up, move away and start their own lives, their own families.

Normal stinks. Sailors shouldn't have to be normal. Ken is in the Army now. He's been to Iraq and seen things that he doesn't tell his mother about. He and I have talked about some of them, but I suspect that there are things he hasn't told me. He takes care of other people's kids now and watches out in the night for them. He has visited a few times, but we haven't taken the big boat out for him. We own a little boat now and are waiting for his next trip home to see if he'll go out in it with us. We're trying to convince him that we are much better at sailing small boats now and he probably won't have to worry nearly as much about falling off, rolling over or getting marooned.

We haven't discussed seasickness yet.