"How will you be able to stand being together so much in such a tiny space?" friends ask as I give them a tour of our new home. I laugh, but frankly I've been wondering that myself.

Over the last few years, my husband, Steve, and I realized we were desperate for a break from our harried, work-driven and overstressed lives. Gradually, we decided to put our careers on hold, our house up for rent and our possessions into storage, and sail from Toronto to the Caribbean.

Close quarters
The new home we're moving into is a 42-foot sailboat. Receta (Spanish for recipe), as we've named her, is elegant, graceful, fast…and a whole lot less roomy than even the tiniest house, more like a walk-in closet with windows. She's only four metres across at her widest, with most of her -- from pointed bow to pinched stern -- much skinnier.

The berth where Steve and I will sleep is as wide as a double bed at the pillow end, but narrows rapidly to a scant 70 centimetres at its foot. In addition, the person who sleeps on the inside -- me -- will have to climb over the person on the outside every time she wants to visit the bathroom -- the bathroom that is the size of a broom closet. And the galley where I'll soon be preparing three meals a day? Standing on its 60-centimetre square floor, I can reach the stove, fridge, freezer, sink and every cupboard.

Two years in paradise in our mid-40s sounds wonderful, but even as we're moving onto this new home, I'm still wondering whether the means of escape we've chosen is the right one. I have never lived onboard a boat for longer than a two-week summer holiday, have almost no blue-water sailing experience and get nervous when the wind pipes up. Aside from my undeveloped sea legs, I'm worried about how our relationship will survive such close quarters. Without the outside stimulation of our jobs, far from friends and family, and together all day every day, what will we have to talk about? What will keep us from driving each other around the bend?

A good team
Eleven months later, we're off the south coast of Grenada, 2,100 nautical miles from Toronto. Steve pays out Receta's anchor chain as I motor the boat slowly backward. We communicate wordlessly via hand signals -- no shouting from bow to cockpit to disturb the calm tropical morning. Within minutes Steve signals that the anchor is set in the sand and Receta floats serenely on blue glass that glitters in the hot sunlight. We had threaded through coral reefs to get into this anchorage -- Steve at the helm; me at the bow. I had silently directed him left, right or straight ahead to keep us in the safe sapphire ribbon of deep water between the yellow-green reefs. To my amazement we are now a smooth and practiced (almost polished) team.