These people spent a year on a boat and lived to tell the story

They took sailing vacations to make sure the kids' stomachs wouldn't turn with every wave. And they began to unwind their work. For Zuckerman, this represented a natural turning point in his career. He had decided he didn't want to spend his life in private equity. On the other hand, "I was in a business where you raise 10-year funds, and while nothing is written in stone, there's a certain obligation to stick around." So he began describing his plans to his business partners, eventually helping recruit his successor.

Meyerson's visiting professor contract at Stanford would end in 2002, and her book, Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change at Work (Harvard Business School Press), would be published in August 2001. (It's now out in paperback.) She timed other projects to end around the same time. She also applied for a tenured position at Stanford's education school but warned that she wouldn't be available until 2003.

Still, she was concerned about the effect a year away would have on her work. "How could I leave without losing momentum?" she thought. "I do work that's important to me, and I've been able to find jobs and create affiliations that have allowed me to do work that's meaningful." What would happen to all of her professional relationships and to her projects when she distanced herself from her office by two continents?

The decision-making process reflected exactly the sort of people Zuckerman and Meyerson were: passionate but deliberate control freaks who sweated the details. "Deb makes decisions via a very lengthy process," says Su-Moon Paik, a close friend. "We had heard about the trip for so long, we never were sure it was going to happen."

Ultimately, though, it was a question of Nowornot. The name derived from a comment Sarah had made years before. When she asked after one dinner to have dessert later, Meyerson said it was "now or never." Sarah replied that "now or not" made more sense. It wasn't that she could never have dessert; she just couldn't have that dessert that night.

Careers would always be there, in some form. Home would be there. It was time to sail. Now or not. The family set off on July 31, 2002, from Cap Ferrat, France.

"I love sailing. The blue seas. Sailing the white caps. Seeing the fish and whales. Oh, the beauty."

-- Sarah's journal, February 8, 2003

The first two months were the roughest, and it wasn't just the seas. Things kept breaking on their French-made yacht. The Italian captain whom the family had hired for the first few weeks was able to fix everything, but the problems tested Zuckerman's and Meyerson's confidence. More than that, everyone was confronting the reality of living very much together, all the time. "At home, my parents went to work, we went to school," observes Adam. "Here, we'd be together a little too much." It didn't help that the kids, plucked from their lives in California, were ambivalent about sailing in the first place. There was sniping between parents and kids and between brothers and sister. Meyerson's mother, Marcia Meyerson, arrived for a visit in Italy in mid-September and whisked the kids away for a few days in Genoa. "I sensed," she says, "that they needed to be away from each other."

Soon enough, though, the family found its pace. Each member had a role: Meyerson was the sailor, Zuckerman the technician; Danny manned the anchor; Adam piloted the dinghy; and Sarah took charge of the bumpers. The kids took turns cooking, cleaning, and shopping, chores they had never had explicit responsibility for before. The family's Ten Commandments were committed to paper (among them, "Thou shalt pick up thy stuff"), defining norms of behavior. School began October 1, bringing its own rhythm. Each morning, Meyerson taught the boys, and Zuckerman tutored Sarah.

The upshot was the family learned to live with one another and flipped the intensity of sharing space on its head. The absence of privacy, they learned, was also an opportunity for intimacy and connection. Parents got to know their children in different ways, and the children came to know and understand their parents, for all their foibles. Mom, they kidded, could be temperamental and had trouble relaxing. And Dad could ramble. "We're a little more human to them, for better or worse," Meyerson says.

They huddled in the cockpit to watch the awesome natural light show of Stromboli's volcano. They woke to see the first light dawning over Corsica. They learned to water-ski and wakeboard, and they played baseball and soccer wherever they found an empty beach. In Rome, father and sons stayed up at an all-night Internet café to watch their beloved Giants play the World Series.