Who We Are

George Kent Kedl b. 1940

Hi! Call me Kent! I’m a retired philosophy professor who spent many years between 1984 and 2000 living on sailboats with my wife Pam. We had our boys, Jake and Andy, with us during the first year when they were ten and fourteen.

Then we went home to South Dakota for almost ten years before taking off again for another seven years at sea, this time just the two of us. We Ran Away to Sea, is the story of our life on boats.

After Pam’s death in 2009, I thought a lot about our sailing years and how hard they were on her. Writing this book, gathering Pam’s letters and my stories together with the help of my second wife, Linnea, has helped me understand our lives during those years. I now live far from the sea again in Albuquerque New Mexico.

This was all quite a long time ago now, and the world of blue-water cruising has greatly changed, although many of the challenges we faced remain the same. I hope you will find our story interesting.

Pamela Thompson Kedl (1944-2009)

“Pamela Kedl has spent her life trying to resist other people’s schedules and avoiding being a professional at anything. Her work has ranged from the esoteric—a flutist, a potter, and a transoceanic sailor—to the pragmatic: a welfare worker, an English teacher, a librarian’s assistant, and a waitress. As soon as she can figure a way to finance it, she wants to travel to the Pacific with her husband, her two sons, and a cat to finish their circumnavigation.” (Women and Houses: An Anthology of Prose, Poetry, and Photography (Unipress: Brookings, SD, 1988) Somewhere along the way, Pam decided against sailing the Pacific, but the letters written during her sailing years make up a large part of We Ran Away to Sea. After she and Kent left the sailboat, she took up photography and created stunning collages by piecing together smaller photos to create large landscapes.

Linnea Hendrickson b. 1944

I’ve spent the past four years helping Kent edit his stories and Pam’s writing to create We Ran Away to Sea. Kent’s first idea was to preserve Pam’s letters. She was a witty, often funny writer and astute observer, and he lost her all too soon. Kent’s writing is wry, subtly humorous, and thoughtful. His love of tinkering with the mechanical aspects of the boat is evident, and those who share that love will probably wish for more, while those who do not could probably do with less. We faced the challenge of combining Pam’s letters, written in the moment, and Kent’s stories, written over several years, to create a dynamic, compelling narrative. We hope we have succeeded. Please buy the book and let us know.