My name is Keith. I'm 45 years old. I live on a Mason 43 sailboat called Lost and Found and I'm currently sailing north along the East Coast toward my kids.
I grew up on the docks of Long Island. Not metaphorically — literally on the docks. Fishing families. Salt air before school. The smell of diesel and a good catch mixed together in a way that tells you exactly where you belong. I thought I knew where I was going.
By thirty I'd built my first real company — an online exchange for seafood futures, a market that didn't yet exist. I created it in Gloucester, Massachusetts, launched it at the Boston Seafood Show, and watched it grow into something that genuinely had never been done. Fishermen could lock in prices before they ever left the dock. Buyers had visibility. It was honest. I was proud of it.
Then I got pushed out by an investor disagreement, and that company became a footnote.
I moved to the Caribbean with a new venture — One Skip Development — trying to build sustainable seafood supply chains in Grenada. We spent four years, over a million dollars, two houses, one marriage nearly broken, one boat sold. We survived a protest that turned into a riot. Two of my business partners were arrested. We uncovered corruption running so deep into local government that I started to understand why reformers end up alone.
Through all of it, I was drinking. Not the way people joke about drinking — the way people hide drinking. By the time I admitted what I was, my wife was thousands of miles away, two of my four children were becoming strangers to me, and I was sleeping on a boat I could barely afford in a harbor I couldn't always name on a map.
That was Day One.
I'm now over 1,300 days sober. I live aboard my sailboat. I have a job I'm good at, in the industry I grew up in, doing sustainability work that actually matters. I am sailing north this summer, back toward my kids, back toward whatever rebuilding looks like when you've earned the right to try.
I have four kids. Two of them have autism. I surf. I climb mountains. I am very comfortable being uncomfortable.
This is not a story about triumph. It's a story about what happens when you choose the hard thing every single day, when no one is watching, when the only witness is the water.
Welcome aboard.
— Keith