About Us

From freedive spearfishing for my dinner in the San Juan Islands to betting on wooden horse races on the island of Vieques to exploring the Amazon River in a dugout canoe and burning my cornea while welding in Guatemala, I never said no to an adventure or new experience. If I wasn’t experiencing something new, I didn’t feel I was truly living. 

In 2020, the pandemic shut down travel and my wife delivered our first son. Lockdown transformed what was a wondrous, free-wheeling life into one of drudgery, of days climbing a corporate ladder and nights warming bottles and playing peek-a-boo with our seadog in the making. 

One night, as I held my son in one arm, the reminder of the tang of sea air tickling the back of my brain, I pulled a copy of Moby Dick down from my bookshelf. Its leather cover was cracked in places and worn smooth in others — years of travel with me as I crossed and recrossed the equator. With a half-bottle of milk and a glass of rye next to me, I was transported back to an earlier time, when I would spend nights gently rocking in the waves while I fell asleep charting constellations from the poop deck. 

As I read, I began to feel a familiar sensation, that excitement of abandoning land for the sea, my first true love. That night, it was settled. I would find a way to reclaim my glory days. I found a sailboat. With my wife’s blessing, we brought home what we would call the “Leaky Teaky.” We fixed her up, sealing windows and setting sail whenever we could, this time going on adventures with our little pup in tow. 

This was the life I had been missing, this is what I needed, but I knew my days of disappearing were over. My collection of artifacts that hung on the walls were a record of a life well-lived, yes, but a life that was — in that iteration — over. I reasoned, though, that there were ways to bring the nautical life into our home, to expose our son to the adventures that may, too, await him. Finding the right items, though, proved as hard as winning against the legendary white whale himself. When I struggled to find what I wanted — what I needed to fulfill the unending itch — I decided to make it myself. I quit my corporate job, and Don Tropico was launched.

 - Don