More Than You Think You Know

Crashes, hot flashes—and more than one man overboard

Follow three renegade women as they pilot the 44-foot luxury yacht Blackout through the Heartland Rivers from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico.

With her children grown and gone, Hailey can no longer stomach living with her abusive husband. In the middle of a boating trip, she steals a sailboat and ventures solo across Lake Michigan. In a Chicago harbor, she meets Robin, chain-smoking divorcee, owner and Captain of the good ship Blackout. When the Coast Guard broadcasts a radio alert for the stolen sailboat, Robin insists Hailey seek asylum and travel downriver with her. In Joliet, they take on Trish, a southbound Las Vegas gold-digger who deserts her Sugar Daddy’s floating palace to join the crew and get out of Illinois.

The trio navigates the 1,300-mile-long series of rivers and locks, keeping weary eyes out for barges and Hailey’s husband. With no sense of destination beyond Mobile Bay, Hailey, Robin, and Trish are on not one journey, but two: America’s Great Loop and the search for their own place to be happy, to be safe, to be themselves.

Journalist and novelist Cyndi Perkins writes what she knows. She has sailed Lake Superior, the Heartland Rivers and the Eastern Seaboard since 1995. Born in Toledo, Ohio, she’s been migrating north since childhood, and living among the Yoopers of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula since the 1980s. She and her husband’s marriage survived two 6,000-mile circumnavigations of America’s Great Loop aboard their 32-foot sailing vessel Chip Ahoy.