What sailing 10,000 miles across the Pacific taught me about dinner parties

It’s July 4th, 2025, and I’ve never been farther from the USA. Rather than fireworks, the erratic explosions I hear are mighty groundswells—waves thrice my height––detonating against the gunwales of our 35-year-old sailboat. Explosions propelled not by gunpowder, but by the energy that has carried these mountains of water thousands of miles across the open sea, to here, to us.

Where is here? 17°42'S, 165°50’W: halfway to Tonga.

Crrrrreak….CRASH. A hastily stowed smorgasbord of books, tools, and waterproof layers flies to the other side of the cabin, the chaotic spray resembling shot out of a 12 gauge.

So much for baking a star spangled cake.

I shoot a tired look over to my partner, Jack, as yet another wave swamps our cockpit and surfs our hull downhill, fast. Jack and I are younger than our boat, Open Range, and a mere fraction of the age of the ancient, swirling energy of which we are currently at the mercy, and we are certainly not ready to die. But there’s not a whole lot we can do.

So we sit below, slouched but braced, eyes raised wearily to our bright orange storm sail as if it’s some sort of idol. I suppose, given that an idol is something you pray to, surrender to, and beg for mercy—in that moment, it was.

SSSSSMACK. Our stuff flies the other way. As I lurch starboard in a drowsy attempt to stem the flow of loose-junk-chaos, I notice a papaya roll out from under a pair of discarded boots and meander loppily across the floor. WE’RE NOT OUT OF FRESH FRUIT! I startle Jack with my celebration. The conditions preclude us from wielding a knife, so I settle for plopping clumsily back down next to Jack, cradling our long lost papaya. Just knowing it’s there is enough to soothe our brains, withering, running on over a week of fake sleep and French Polynesia’s mystery meat version of SPAM.

I think back to the source of this particular papaya: Maupiha’a, the glittering westernmost atoll of French Polynesia and our springboard for the 1,400mi crossing to Tonga. Maupiha’a is completely remote: a thin, winding ring of land in the wild Pacific boasting only small strips of trees and raw, rugged rocky reefs. It gets no supply ships, has no means of connection with the outside world. It used to be home to a community of copra farmers, families who spent long, shimmery days harvesting, shucking, and drying crate loads of coconut husks—a micro export that would fetch a livable payout from French wholesalers, enough of an income to send for coffee, flour, clothes, books, and tools from the bigger islands.

Years ago, the wholesalers raised their minimums. They needed 3 tons of copra now, per shipment, or no deal. The families rose to the challenge, harvesting more, for longer, and recruiting anyone they could from the closest island of Maupiti to come join the operation. Still, it wasn’t enough. The payouts stopped coming, and one by one, the copra farmers left the atoll, catching rides with passing sailors to move their families back to the livable economies of Maupiti or Raiatea. All of the copra families waved goodbye to their island as it disappeared over the horizon.

Except one.

Adrienne had flashed her contagious, missing-teeth grin after she finished recounting the recent history of Maupiha’a. She gestured around at her family’s lush tropical compound, a swath of homesteaded crops surrounded by the abandoned shacks of their old community. They grew lettuce, watermelon, dozens of herbs, cucumber, zucchini, tomatoes, and they harvested abundantly from the natural lime and papaya trees that dotted the strip of land. Coconut milk flowed readily as a decadent dressing for the fish, lobster, and crab that roamed Adrienne’s reefs. Wood from the atoll’s trees shaped the small boat that Marcello hammered away at on the beach. The family’s 2 scrappy dogs ran giddy circles around the sole, stately, tied up pig. “You see?” Adrienne laughed. “Why would we leave?”

Enjoying the distraction from the trembling drumbeat of mid-Pacific swell, I continued to think back to our recent time on Maupiha’a. Our days anchored there while waiting for this weather window to Tonga were filled with atoll walks, glittering lagoon swims, laughs and broken French with with Faimano and little Teunu, and multiple decadent family meals prepared and shared generously by Adrienne and Marcello. We gifted tools and instant coffee, they gifted luscious, whole coconut crab and sun-ripe fruit, none of us expecting anything in return, communicating mostly in this language all of us understood. I look down at the papaya in my arms, a tender, yellow reminder of the generosity of a family who worked hard to grow and harvest their island’s gifts, and even harder to share them. A family who invites unexpected, pale, bedraggled visitors who speak 4 words of French into their home, of course, as if it’s the only natural thing to do. A mother whose embrace carries the same warmth whether she’s known you 10 seconds or 10 years.

My mind wanders to Lea and Sopi, who months before, had fed us freshly speared goat and poisson cru in their home beneath the towering spires of Fatu Hiva. We had just sailed 3,100 miles from Mexico, managing landfall on the sheer, ephemeral Marquesas islands. Sopi’s necklace of wild boar tusks jingled when he laughed, which was often.

Then there was Tai Nui, who on the Tuamotuan atoll of Apataki, caught our frantic, drenched lines when we peeled into the reef pass at 5am—unannounced, outrunning a storm. Who welcomed us, guided us barefoot across his reef, stopping gently to coax small octopi out from their hidey-holes and lifting up slippery sea cucumbers for us to squelch.

I smiled, suddenly awestruck at the deep, automatic generosity that had punctuated our odyssey thus far. At that moment, in the lurching boat, I didn’t yet know about the abundant kindness we still had yet to experience in the remainder of the vast Pacific. I didn’t yet know Ofa, who in Tonga would insist on hosting us for multiple home cooked meals, despite being beyond busy as her extended family’s primary caretaker at the age of 25. We had yet to meet Moui, Ofa’s nephew, who would gleefully run Jack around his island, hand in hand, and his adoptive mother Hu’e, who would ultimately send us off from Tonga with a forever hug in the form of handmade whale bone gifts. I didn’t yet know that Ofa means ‘love’ in Tongan, and so does a plate of slow-cooked cassava.

I had yet to meet Va and Ben, who in the Yasawa islands of western Fiji would take us in for more than just dinner. We would sit in quiet, friendly sevusevu ceremony with the village chief, and I would hike up my sarong for a gleeful, green, wet game of village rugby, included—and even passed the ball—without a second thought. Va and Ben would invite our giggly group of adventurous visiting friends to stay for a drawn-out, starry, symphony of a night with the beat of pounding kava as the metronome.

And I had yet to meet Tamin, who would stop us in the grocery store in a small volcanic peninsula town in Aotearoa and dust off his muddy hands from a long day of cattle work to shake ours. Taimin would invite us to park our raggedy van on his land, and he would go on to share innumerable Steinlagers around the fire, haul his boat out to take us fishing, and let us feel like we were helping him milk his herd when we were undoubtedly slowing him down. He would show us ancient eels in his creek, hand us his newborn chicks, and name two cattle dog puppies after us. He’d say “the yappy shithead is yours, Lauren,” which is kiwi speak for “welcome to the family.” He would haul our van out of the mud. He would invite us back again and again and again, with no fanfare. Just uncomplicated matter-of-fact-ness.

And boy, I had yet to meet Brett and Brenda, who took us in in Beachlands as if we were their own; and Clive, the rugged, grinning farmer we met in the windswept outer reaches of Dunedin who would house us, feed us, and romp us around secret surf spots and the cliffs of northland. Who still texts us pictures of sailboats that might be his ticket to never-ending surf. Who made it abundantly clear in smiles, burgers, and long, real hugs we always have a home on his farm. And Travis, whose roof was our roof.

Back on the boat, I stare out of the portholes at the roiling sea to the east, behind us. East, where helping hands had propelled us forward, given us wings, sent us west. Where our families had filled our sails as we cast off from home in Santa Cruz, and where strangers had filled our bellies and hearts on tiny volcanic rocks a thousand miles from anywhere.

I turn my head forward, west, full of horizons and clouds and unknown. And, unbeknownst to me, full of a million moments of home, of peace, of shared fresh fish, of happy tears, of hearts stretching, reaching out beyond language and borders and age and culture.

Now, when I look back at a bird’s-eye image of the swirling, pulsing Pacific, I see tiny beams of warmth and home poking through the clouds, connecting the dots in a constellation from Santa Cruz, to Baja, to Fatu Hiva to Apaktai to Maupiha’a, to Vava’u to the Yasawas to Mongonui to the Taranaki. And I vow to shine my own beam with reckless abandon, my heart a home for strangers and friends alike. My table set with one extra plate, just in case. We’re all just lighthouses, guiding each other home, in from the wide, wide sea.