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.