Crossing an ocean on a sailing vessel is not an original venture, but neither is it a common one. Though more than 7 billion of us live on this water planet, out on the seas on a small boat, you might well think you have this blue planet all to yourself. By and large, we humans think of ourselves as terrestrial creatures, even though science reveals that the massive oceans govern so many of our life-support systems on land. In spite of the facts, most of our apparent interests lie ashore and we turn our backs to the sea.

Still, throughout the ages there have been those who’ve fared the sea, people driven by such motives as curiosity, necessity, and glory, as well as those forced to sea. Sea tales include some of the most exciting, dangerous and fantastical adventures. From Odysseus to Melville’s Ishmael and Hemingway’s Santiago, the sea is an excellent stage for human dramas with nature and within ourselves. In casting our gaze and all our senses seaward during our offshore passages aboard Llyr, nothing familiar or particularly comforting fills our fields of vision. And as EB White wrote, “the sound of the sea is the most time-effacing sound there is.” It is an opaque world of blues and silver, salty smells and salt-encrusted skin, where time is marked by watch duty in a rolling cascade of night and day. The occasional visit some 800 miles or more offshore by large pods of dolphins riding our bow wave or the graceful flights of flying fish breaking away from our dark water shadow brings a frolicking reminder of all that lies below us and a whimsical wish for inter-species conversation.

If being offshore is our liminal period, the environment that is neither the ridge nor reef of this expedition but the border-zone between, our activity around coastal waters, the nexus of land and sea, constitutes the field sites for our expeditionary studies and work on behalf of defining and building sustainable markets that support biocultural diversity.