“So... what kind of boat do you have?” she asked, flirtatiously.

He told her.

“Mine’s bigger,” she declared. And so, a love-affair was born.

Two years later, the Rhodes was sold, Peter and Antonia were married, and Peter found himself working 10 hours a day, retrofitting the chainplates on Antonia’s boat. He’s still not sure how this happened. But as Peter says, “I’m a committed man,” which either means something about marital fidelity, or else he thinks he should be committed. We haven’t asked.

Peter Murphy is the Captain (and now part-owner) of Sereia. He’s spent most of his life on the East Coast, especially New York and Vermont. Apart from a brief interlude with network engineering, in which he tried (and failed) to be practical, he has sailed all his life: in Long Island Sound, the Chesapeake Bay, and up and down the East Coast from Nova Scotia to Grenada. He has crewed in three Newport-Bermuda Races and the Hemingway Cup. Peter also has extensive solo and crewed sailing experience on the West Coast, including an ill-fated solo passage from San Diego to Hawaii. (More on that later.) Back in 1996, Peter crewed on the HMS Rose (the tall ship most people remember from Master and Commander), which, apart from giving him a good basic grounding in traditional sailing, is a great way to pick up chicks. Peter is a licensed U.S. Coast Guard 100 GT Captain, and an International Yachtmaster Offshore.

Antonia Murphy (née Antonia Tellis) is the First Mate and Galley Goddess of Sereia. She spent most of her life over-achieving in fancy French schools, until she got a bee in her bonnet to try cooking professionally. She started out as an apprentice at Picholine, a three-star French restaurant in New York, where the jocular kitchen staff called her “Bain Marie,” and taught her to recognize fresh horseradish in the walk-in by its resemblance to “big, black dick.” Spoiled forever for the refined world of academia, Antonia worked for a brief time at Boulevard restaurant in San Francisco before making the grave error of cooking on a private yacht in the Caribbean. She has not yet fully recovered. There is nothing, she tells us, more purely beautiful than sunrise on a sailboat at sea. (If you can avoid vomiting in your chopped onions, that is.) Antonia has an ASA Coastal Cruising Certification, but mostly she just loves to cook.

With regard to Peter’s ill-fated solo voyage from San Diego to Hawaii: he did not sink the boat. He did, however, get becalmed 400 miles offshore, which gave him ample opportunity to realize that he was a shmuck to be sailing away from a woman who genuinely loved to sail. He turned his boat around, sold it in San Francisco, and proposed to Antonia forthwith.

On October 31, 2005, Peter and Antonia Murphy embarked on a circumnavigation attempt aboard Sereia.