"When Fabio and I first met, I was on vacation and he was at work. I was en route to Kuna Yala, an autonomous indigenous zone on the Caribbean coast of Panama, on a solo trip. As it happened, he was captaining a charter boat there, which offered an affordable way to cruise Kuna Yala. We met in the dark at 5:30am in Panama City waiting for the bus out to the jump-off point for the boat.

We spent just a few days sailing together on that trip, with a motley crew of travelers, American ex-pats, a Panamanian party animal named Jorge (pronounced Jor-HEEEEEEY!) and the Kuna first mate Dino, but by the time I returned to NYC, I was already thinking to myself, “This Fabio guy has it figured out.”

I wrote to him as soon as I got home, and he replied with an offer to sail together again, someday. So began a long, strange correspondence between an urban planner fully immersed in NYC-living and a former psychologist now sailing boats in a remote locale, clinging to the mast for a whiff of cell phone reception.

Fast forward two years, and we are sitting together in Fairhaven Shipyard, on the south coast of Massachusetts, in a tiny sailboat that we co-own and have been refitting for the past 6 months. In the next week or so we will begin to move our boat down the US coast to warmer waters in Florida.

We finally had a going away party recently that ultimately convinced the majority of my friends that Fabio does exist and we are, in fact, sailing off into the sunset..."

Words by Kate Zidar.

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