An Epic Journey Becomes ‘The Uncertainty Principle’

Five years ago, my 13-year-old son Kal and I started writing a novel about sailing together. It was 2020 and we were sailing a catamaran in the Caribbean. Though there weren’t many boats out there at that moment in the pandemic, we occasionally spotted a superyacht and sometimes dropped our hook nearby. At night, isolated on our own boat, we looked across the water at those gleaming, hulking vessels and talked about what it would be like to meet the people on board. Kal pushed it further: What if a bored and lonely teen (perhaps resembling himself) met a strikingly good-looking teenage girl from a megayacht?

That simple conversation blossomed over the months looking out at the water. We came home to San Francisco and Kal suggested that our main character meet not just one teenager but two, and be forced to choose between them. The other sailor wouldn’t be a rich kid on a fancy boat, but rather someone trying to make every dollar last. Would our main character choose the soulful sailor or the life-of-the-party heiress?

After two years, we had a manuscript and sent it to publishers. By that time Kal was racing FJs in the Bay with the San Francisco School of the Arts high school sailing team. He wanted to go fast while the rest of the family was content to bob around in the Bay on our Dufour 310, Grace. So, on weekends, Kal used Latitude‘s Crew List to find crewing spots with other like-minded speedsters.

Initially, the book was rejected by publishers. We were told that young adults weren’t interested in the sailing life. Kids were too focused on the digital lifestyle and wanted books that reflected the modern world. Kal didn’t feel that way. He liked the old ways, the feeling of working with your hands to make something real. As artificial intelligence rose, it felt right to wield a hammer and chisel. On Tuesday nights, we volunteered at the Dolphin Club in San Francisco to help take care of the Whitehall rowboats under the guiding eyes of master boat builders Jon Bielinski and Julia Hechanova. We started hearing people talk about the “toolbelt” generation, young people who wanted to learn craftsmanship. Perhaps this next generation did care about something more than Instagram and TikTok?

Finally, in 2023, we received an email from Penguin Random House saying that they wanted to publish the book. We got on the phone with an editor who said that she knew nothing about sailing but was taken by the core idea of the book: a family walking away from the modern world to live closer to nature on a sailboat.

There was a hitch, though. We would need to make revisions, so Kal took a semester off regular school and we set up shop on Grace, which was docked at Fort Mason. We called it “boat school,” and when we got tired of writing, we’d shove off and sail around Alcatraz.

Now, five years from that moment of deep isolation during the pandemic, the book is finished and we’ve tried in fits and starts to walk away from the modern world, just like the family we wrote about. Kal graduated from high school and now studies at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in Port Hadlock, Washington. He dreams of building his own wooden boat to go bluewater sailing. And my wife and I just got back from where it all started, sailing a catamaran from St. Martin to Grenada over a period of six weeks. Hopefully, the book will help bring others to the magic of the sea.