The Voyage of the Northern Magic

Ever dream of selling up and running away to sea? Diane Stuemer and her husband, Herbert, were once a typical suburban couple entering middle age, with a comfortable home and three boys under twelve. A year later they had sold their business, rented out their house, and were setting out to circumnavigate the globe in a 40-year-old yacht. Their entire sailing experience consisted of six afternoons on the Ottawa River.
Over the next four years, squeezed into quarters no bigger than the Stuemers' old bedroom, the family of five would become seasoned mariners. They would battle deadly storms at sea and evade real-life pirates. Dodge waterspouts and lightning strikes and witness the bombing of the USS Cole. See the staggering beauty of Borneo's rainforest, and its destruction from logging. Be arrested at gunpoint and entertained like visiting royalty. In all, they would visit 34 countries and cover 35,000 nautical miles.
Almost everywhere they went, the family made lasting friendships. They learned to trust each other and embrace opportunity, and in Kenya they learned the true meaning of humanity. As Northern Magic pushed onward, many thousands followed the family's progress in Diane's dispatches to the Ottawa Citizen, and thousands more turned out to cheer when the amazing Stuemers came home.

Diane Stuemer's journal of her family's voyage appeared weekly in the Ottawa Citizen from September 1997 to August 2001. The articles enjoyed phenomenal success and the Stuemers appeared on the newspaper's front page on nine occasions. On March 15, 2003, five months after The Voyage of the Northern Magic was first published, Diane lost her battle with melanoma. Her husband, Herbert, and their three boys, Michael, Jonathan, and Christopher, continue their commitment to activism and humanitarian work. To learn more about the Stuemers, the voyage of the Northern Magic, and the family's ongoing international projects, visit www.northernmagic.com.