My name is Kate Theisen and I’m a lot like most ten-year olds. I love to swim, ride my bike and read. I collect things, like stuffed animals and stamps. My favorite food is pizza and I can’t wait to get my braces off this summer. I was born in the mountains in Vail, Colorado and started sailing when I was just a baby. Most people don’t know that you can sail in the mountains. When my sister Kenna and I were three years old, my parents bought a 41-foot sailboat that we named Out of Bounds and we moved to Wisconsin to live on it.

Since then we’ve sailed through the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal, down the Hudson River to New York City and out to the Atlantic Ocean. We spent a couple of years living and sailing in North Carolina and Florida. Next fall we will be sailing to the Bahamas.

I love sailing because it gives me the chance to travel and explore new things. I’ve got to snorkel over shipwrecks, and swim in fjords. Sometimes when we’re sailing, dolphins swim and leap in our bow wake. Once we sailed right through a pod of humpback whales. It was amazing to see and listen to these huge creatures. We’ve had huge loggerhead turtles swim past our boat and watched a school of manta rays belly flopping all around us. I’ve helped take our boat through over 100 locks and I’ve already sailed more than 8,000 miles.

My sister and I have our own dinghy named Adelia’s Song. A dinghy is a small boat that we tow behind our big boat. When we anchor, we use the dinghy to row or sail to shore. I love to take the dinghy out just for fun too. My cats usually come along in the dinghy. They love to explore with me. When I get together with other cruising friends, we have sail races with our dinghies.

When you live on a boat, rowing around in the dinghy is a great way to meet friends when you come to a new anchorage. Most of the anchorages we’ve been to are in little coves of islands where no one lives. We all go hiking, even the cats.

Sometimes we fish or crab or dive for lobsters and we almost always go swimming or snorkeling. One of the most awesome places we’ve ever anchored is under the Statue of Liberty. The glow of Miss Liberty’s torch was like a nightlight.

Of course it’s not all fun and games living on a boat. I have chores around the “house,” I help sail the boat and I attend homeschool. Having my mom and dad for teachers is fun. My mom teaches me reading and writing. I write a lot of letters and postcards to my cousins, friends and pen-pals. My dad teaches me math. It’s lots of fun because in math class I get to help navigate the boat. You need to use lots of math to figure out things like where you are and how to get where you want to go.

My favorite thing to study about is dolphins. I think they’re really intelligent animals. But best of all I love all the field trips we get to take.

People sometimes ask what I don’t like about living on a boat. That’s easy. Since the boat moves around a lot when we sail, I have to keep my room picked up so all my stuff doesn’t go flying around. I definitely don’t like cleaning my room. My mom says that proves that life on a boat isn’t so different from life ashore after all.