- July 30, 2026
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Sally Lippert was in search of her next adventure, and of a certain person.
Taking out a paper she said she has carried in her wallet for 10 years, she read that she was looking for someone “tall, dark, handsome, with an accent and a sailboat.”
Mark Shrosbree disputed the "tall" and "dark" descriptions, but Lippert said getting most of it right “ain’t bad.”
The two are preparing to sail off on the vessel Shrosbree named “Ra” and keeps moored at Marina Jack while refitting it in the style of a junk rig, also known as a Chinese lug sail.
When Shrosbree, who comes from South Africa, was younger and serving in the army, he had many conversations involving lists of things to climb, or do.
The 65-year-old said he’s gotten around to about a third of the items on his list.
While he never climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, in 2016 he set off on a journey to do one of the things everyone had mentioned — circumnavigating the globe.
Lippert, 68, is a dive master who said she has been on the water for 40 to 50 years. She has also been sailing for about 15, having spent 10 days on the Atlantic and 10 on the Pacific, as well as being a United States Coast Guard captain.
“I met him and I decided to keep him,” she said.
Shrosbree is residing in the U.S. through a visa, for which he gained an extension.
With his stay set to expire at the start of August, they plan to head to The Bahamas, to the district of Exuma, so he can exit the country in time.
He was working quickly on Ra, with help from Lippert, who said she is a good painter.
Shrosbee was inspired to sail a junk rig due to a book by Annie Hill called “Voyaging on a Small Income," and also took inspiration, and the boat’s name, from the nonfiction book “The Kon-Tiki Expedition” by Thor Heyerdahl.
He calls the voyage, thus far, “more than what I wanted.”
“I told the kids it would take me three years to do it, and it's 10 years down the road, and I'm not even a third of the way yet,” he said. “But I quickly realized that it's too short a time. You can do it in three years, but you don't see anything then. You miss most of it.”
The journey started turbulently.
After 18 days, he was caught in a storm and his sail was damaged, so he returned to South Africa and rebuilt it. After setting out again, on the way from St. Helena Island to Salvador, Brazil, he broke the rudder in half.
“Luckily, the maritime community is amazing, because they help out anybody that's in trouble, and so I got a lot of help from big ships and container ships and things like that…” he said. “I must say, it was great, but then getting to land was the greatest. You see so much and you learn so much, depending on how you do it. I was doing it on the bones of my butt because I didn't have a large income.”
After five years, he reached Grenada, where he spent two-and-a-half years and bought a Beneteau boat, sailing to Panama. But there, the idea of refitting a boat as a junk rig came to the forefront of his mind.
Taking the advice of American friends, he flew to Miami. While in St. Petersburg, he came into contact with Lippert, who had a boat for sale.
“He says, ‘No, that's too big, and so I said, ‘Well, you're going to need to save my number because I'll be crew for you when you go back to Panama,” she said.
Eventually he called and said he wanted to see the boat after all. She got it ready quickly and sat in the captain’s chair as he approached.
“His shirt was unbuttoned,” she said. “He walks to my boat, and we met. Probably talked for maybe an hour, and then I asked him where he was staying. He said he was staying in his car, and I said, ‘You've got to be kidding!"
She said he could stay on the boat, and although he initially refused, he called that evening and said he'd take her up on the offer.
She later helped him to bring the boat he ultimately purchased, a Nautical Development Offshore 40, into the dock in September.
They described putting the last touches on the boat towards the end of July as they prepared to sail to the Bahamas.
Lippert, a real estate broker, is partially retired, but can work from a Starlink satellite system.
She has three kids and four grandkids, but that couldn't keep her away from the adventure.
“I told my kids,” she said. “I said I'm going to take off. They're like, ‘Go for it, mom. Go for it.”
There was more work to be done on the vessel than Shrosbree expected before departure.
The bottom of the boat was suffering from what is known as osmosis, a series of blisters in which the bonded layers on the surface come apart.
About a quarter inch of material had to be removed, while a friend of Lippert who works with epoxy helped with the replacement process, which took two days and involved four people.
“For days, for weeks, you grind it to get it smooth again, and then you put more stuff on it. It's a huge process,” Shrosbree said.
But the most important step was the transformation of the vessel into a junk rig, an ancient type of boat that features tall, narrow sails extending forward from a mast that is freestanding, not supported by cables.
While a departure from the most common configuration for a modern sailboat, a Bermuda rig, the vessel has enthusiastic proponents, including Shrosbree.
“It's crazy, because the biggest fault of masts coming down is those cablings; their rigging will will give way,” he said.
He said the new mast will also make it easier for the sailor to reef, or reduce the surface area of a sail.
“I could reduce a sail inside the cockpit without having to go anywhere,” he said.
The two mast poles Shrosbree installed are street lamp posts he acquired from an infrastructure services company at what he calls “a ridiculously good price.”
He created the two 17-foot-long sails in Lippert’s garage using UV-resistant canvas, while drawing on skills from his history in upholstery. He says making the sails himself dramatically reduced the cost.
He built a cabin roof that will house solar panels and will serve as a rain catcher, and is also making numerous other renovations to features including rooms inside the living area.
Once it’s finished, the next step is to shoot for George Town in the Exuma district of The Bahamas.
“The colors of the waters are colors that we don't even have words for,” Lippert said. “They’re so beautiful, blues and turquoise and purple. Even the bottoms of all the clouds are turquoise.”
When they leave at the beginning of August, they will sail into the Caloosahatchee River at Fort Myers Beach before heading into the ocean. So far, the vessel has been on a test run of three to four hours, and Shrosbree says it’s sailing very well.
What the next steps are remains to be seen.
Lippert said she’s taking things one month at a time. She also notes that, with the Pacific Ocean still to be crossed, Shrosbree still has the longest stretches of ocean ahead.
Shrosbree also doesn’t know what’s next for the trip.
Before, he said, he planned out his route, but then he met an older man who told him that was not the way it should be done, and that the stops should be based on listening to people along the way.
“I think we'll see what comes up and what sounds interesting,” he said.
