Grand Rapids Press, January 23, 2003 WIND, WAVES, WEB INTERNET LINKS GRAND RAPIDS STUDENTS WITH FAMILY ON LONG SAILING ADVENTURE For the past five years, John Otterbacher and Barbara Craft and their daughters, Katie, 14, and Erin, 10, have sailed across the Atlantic Ocean three times, visiting 13 countries and numerous islands in their 50-foot sloop, Grace. The Grand Rapids family was back home earlier this week finishing up holiday visits and launching an Internet-based education exchange that will connect local students and teachers to Katie and Erin as they continue their travels. Paula Doyle, a family friend and teacher at New Century Montessori High School in Grand Rapids, was instrumental in the program's creation. She said direct correspondence between the girls and students their age has endless learning possibilities. "The girls are excited about communicating with students on marine life, living on a boat, sailing -- there's so many connections to curriculum in terms of weather, traveling, language arts, history and culture," Doyle said. The Web site www.otterbacher.org allows students to write to Erin and Katie, read journal entries about their adventures and peruse photos of the Craft-Otterbacher family around the world. "There are lots of ways children learn," Craft said. "Some do very well reading books and listening to teachers. But I think some children's imaginations might be more engaged if they had the opportunity to communicate with children who are traveling and have actually seen the places they are studying." The sailing quartet has visited France, Portugal's Azores Islands, Bermuda, Ireland, England, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Denmark. The family traveled back to Paris where they are "wintering" -- living on their boat, docked in the Seine River, until spring. They then will continue their tour of Europe, making their way home in fall 2003 or 2004. At that time, the girls will return to regular school and the parents will start planning a trip for just the two of them, for when the girls are in college. The Craft-Otterbacher family caught the sailing bug more than 14 years ago when the couple and their eldest child, John Ryan, took a year-and-a-half sailing trip across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. "On the way home it was very clear to us that we didn't get it out of our system," Craft said. Despite what may seem like an extravagant lifestyle, the family operates on a modest $1,500 a month, the income generated by rent money from houses they own in Grand Rapids. Before the adventure on the high seas, the couple each had their own practice in Grand Rapids -- Craft as an attorney and Otterbacher as a clinical psychologist. The duo decided in 1990 to start saving for the cruise and purchase a boat suited for long-term living. Ten years later, they had paid off a couple of houses and saved enough for the trip. The girls are home-schooled by their mother on the boat they call "big for a boat, but small for a house." The girls usually take over sailing for their parents at night, keeping an eye on the compass and a hand on the wheel. The rotating shift schedule began after a self-steering mechanism fell off the back of the boat. That has been the family's closest call so far, though the Grace is equipped with everything they might need for an emergency. Craft said the hardest part is crossing the Atlantic, which on a quick trip can take 32 days. Erin said the long passage is "mentally hard," but she brushes off the tedium easily, which is not surprising for a kid who has spent a night in the Tower of London. "I used to get seasick if we were going on a long passage," Erin said. "I can be seasick for the first 24 hours; then I get used to it." Despite occasional bouts of cabin fever, Katie said she'd take surf over turf any day. "If I could choose between living on the boat and coming back, I'd pick living on the boat." Otterbacher recently completed an autobiography tracing the time his family left on the trip in 1998 to their landfall in Ireland in August of 1999. "Passages of the Heart" has not been published yet, but some of his articles have been printed in Cruising World magazine and can be accessed from the family's Web site.