From Katahdin to the Cockpit: Our Next Chapter

Life aboard Avemar again, April’s remote teaching, and my 2026 PCT NOBO

April and I completed our 2,000+ mile Appalachian Trail thru-hike on September 24, 2025. After the trek was done, we returned to our sailing home, Avemar, in Florida, where we’re already planning our next adventures.

We’re still hiking and walking almost daily. The photo above was taken this evening on a walk through the scrub—deep sandy trails in Seabranch Preserve State Park—near where we’ve been moored through the holidays.

Since we’ve returned, April has been rebuilding her tutoring company, Your Next Chapter Tutoring, where she remotely teaches students with dyslexia and other reading challenges, helps students with scholarship applications, and supports language arts and literature coursework.

You may remember from earlier posts that April was in the classroom for 33 years, teaching across every grade level. She retired the day she moved aboard Avemar—back in May 2024—on her last day of school.

I know I wrote about it at the time. She left her classroom that day, locked the door, drove to the boat, and we left Port Salerno, Florida. That evening we were already offshore in the Gulf Stream, sailing north toward Rhode Island.

April specializes in helping kids with dyslexia learn to read and write and perform at grade level. She’s been using research-based methods in her private tutoring work for ten years, and she’s now training as an Orton-Gillingham Associate-in-Training. The Orton-Gillingham approach is widely considered the gold standard for teaching struggling readers. Her final assessments are at a summer camp in the mountains of North Carolina in summer 2026, where she’ll be teaching and hiking with her students.

And there’s more: April is also working part-time at Western Governors University in a role where she evaluates student teachers during their in-classroom practicums before graduation. In other words, she helps determine when they’re ready to teach.

With her hands full this year—and with the goal of getting back to 100% remote work so we can keep exploring the world on Avemar—I’ve got plans to do something new as well.

On April 13, I’ll be starting a NOBO hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s a 2,600+ mile trail from Mexico to Canada through the deserts and mountains of California, then north through Oregon and Washington to the Canadian border. We’ve got a map on the wall, and we’re planning the towns along the way where April can come hike a bit and visit during breaks.

I also wanted to note that I’ll be posting more on Substack—sharing briefs and photos as I hike the PCT this year—and then as we prep the boat with two major projects this fall so we can begin cruising full-time in early 2027.

During 2025, I couldn’t post much from the trail beyond the occasional link to our YouTube videos. Now that we’re back and settled in, I’m going to remove the posts that are only a YouTube embed to clean up the homepage.

Our 134+ Appalachian Trail YouTube videos can be found in a single playlist here:

If you’ve been following along on YouTube, you’ll notice the videos are still catching up—we’re currently posting the New Jersey section even though we finished the trail on September 24, 2025. I have over 13,000 photos and unedited video from the remainder of the hike, and I’ll keep adding episodes to the playlist incrementally until the full journey is documented.

I’m mostly posting so we have the entire hike preserved, but I’m also thrilled that people have enjoyed following along. I’m a bit sad we couldn’t post videos in real time, but on-trail connectivity was spotty at best—and once I got behind, it was hard to keep the timeline synced with our progress. Either way, I’m going to post all of the videos from the trail.

My goal for 2026 is to post at least one Substack “Note” per day. It may be only a photo. It may be a video. It may be a short note about the day.

You’ll find “Notes” in the top menu bar of this site. I’ll do my best to share at least one update per day for the entire PCT hike here on Substack.

I did purchase a ZOLEO satellite communicator for this hike, which I did not have on the Appalachian Trail. If I can’t get a post to upload, I’ll send it to April to schedule for me so we can keep a steady flow of updates.

I hope all of you are well—and for those in the Southeast and Northeast right now, I hope you stay safe, fed, and warm as this storm rolls through over the weekend!