When my wife and I decided to run away to sea, we thought we knew what we were doing. Our first few months on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, or "the Ditch," disabused us of that notion. Our seamanship was adequate, but our expectations weren't realistic. Life's a Ditch isn't so much about where we went and what we saw during our time in the Ditch, but about how we reacted to it and how our lives were changed by our experiences. Share the surprises we had and the choices that we made as we discovered what we got ourselves into when we abandoned our comfortable life ashore to become seagoing wanderers.