Small Ship Cruise Experts Share Their Inspiration & Experiences

We’re Small-Ship Cruise Experts

Heidi M.Sarna

So far, I’ve explored 78 countries around the world by boat, road, plane, foot, bicycle and camel. My first big journey was a six-month trip around the world back in the days when Pan Am sold a 16-leg flight package for a song. My future husband and I hit 20 countries on six continents with memorable adventures including a three-day “cruise” down the Amazon aboard a rickety fishing boat held together with a combination of luck and rust.

Not too surprisingly, after this trip and armed with a master’s degree in American and English Lit, I landed a job at a travel magazine. A cruise magazine to be precise. A few years later, I left to become a freelance writer and as fate would have it, have spent most of my career penning travel articles and guidebooks, many about cruises. I’m a member of SATW, the Society of American Travel Writers, and proud to have won several Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism awards for my writing and for our QuirkyCruise site.

Check out my CV for more details!

My credits include co-authoring Frommer’s Cruises and Ports of Call for a decade, plus several editions of Frommer’s European Cruises and Cruise Vacations for Dummies. A stack of newspaper, magazine and web credits includes everything from CNBC.com, Conde Nast Traveler, CNN.com, Afar.com, USA Today and ForbesTraveler.com to the Star Ledger, International Herald Tribune and Singapore’s Straits Times. Throw in many hundreds of stories for Frommers.com, along with The Points Guy, Porthole, Travel Weekly, Cruise Travel and Singapore’s Expat Living, and you should get the picture. I’ve written a lot about cruises and travel, based on my experiences globetrotting aboard more than 125 ships large and small, and it’s those small ones that have always been my favorites.

Up-close and personal Alaska cruises on the small Cruise West ships and crazy Caribbean adventures aboard Windjammer Barefoot Cruises pirate-y schooners got me hooked on small ships many moons ago, and though both those lines are now, sadly, defunct, their legacy lives on in QuirkyCruise.

I met Ted Scull in the early 1990s while living in New York, and we became colleagues and fast friends. From 2006 – 2023, before moving back to the US to the DC area, I was based in Singapore with my husband and twin sons, loving the awesome travel ops and even the heat and those dramatic tropical downpours. Spending much of my adult life in two of the world’s busiest ports has been a quirky coincidence professionally, but collaborating on this site with one of the world’s most respected ship authorities and travel writers seems to be my destiny — and an absolute honor. Thank you Ted!

— Heidi Sarna
Singapore, October 2015

Theodore W.Scull

I am happiest near water, over water or better still on a conveyance moving through water. When my brother Sandy and I were deemed old enough, mother took us to Europe by ship. Foreign travel soon became a cherished part of my life and living abroad in Paris and London only added to the opportunities.

Over these many decades, I have spent more than five years of my life on overnight vessels of all types — ocean liners, cruise ships, riverboats, night boats, coastal vessels, expedition ships, sailing ships and even a couple of freighters, while traveling to over 120 countries on seven continents.

After working for Holland America Line, my first full-time job, and a decade of teaching with the summers to travel, I took up travel writing with an emphasis on the cruise industry, initially for newspapers and the travel industry, then shifting to magazines, websites, and lecturing. I also wrote a cruise guide —“One Hundred Best Cruise Vacations” — that ran to four editions, covering the waterfront with the best of every type of ship available.

Having traveled a lot, and I mean real travel, by land and especially by train and over the road, I began to gravitate more to smaller ships, ones that kept in touch with their cultural and geographic surroundings. People I met started asking me where to find more information on smaller cruise ships.

A half-dozen years ago, I went to publishers with the idea of writing such a guide and got turned down. The money was in writing about the big ships where far more people had an interest. However, now with the Internet, small-ship alternatives suddenly became doable. Then in late 2014, Heidi Sarna, who I first met 25 years ago in a cruise magazine office in the Lincoln Building across from Grand Central, had the same idea to develop a website resource along these same lines; she had already chosen a name — QuirkyCruise: A Guide to Small Ships. It took me seconds to say “Yes, let’s collaborate.”

Here are the initial results of our endeavors, a labor of love that will be expanded, improved and updated — thanks to the Internet.

We hope you will find your ship, and many more after that.

— Ted Scull
New York, NY, October 2015

Our Small-Ship Cruise Experts

Alison Abbott

Alison Abbott is a freelance writer and digital influencer living in Boston. With a focus on sustainable travel, she provides authentic destination information, reviews and travel tips. Alison specializes in small ship cruises, luxury, food and wine and responsible adventure travel. She is the founder and editor behind the website Green With Renvy and a local expert for AFAR Media.

David Cogswell

David Cogswell is a freelance writer based in Hoboken, New Jersey, whose articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, TravelPulse.com and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to others.

Judi Cohen

Judi Cohen is a Toronto-based freelance writer and social media influencer. Judi fell in love with cruising over 45 years ago on her honeymoon and is passionate about sharing stories about small ship cruising in polar regions and off-beat destinations. She is the founder of the website TravelingJudi.com. She also writes about her travels to over 95 countries for Bold, Zoomer, World Traveler Magazine, All Things Cruise, Travel Market Report, Baxter Media, and more.

Judi Cuervo

Judi Cuervo is a New York City native who fell in love with cruising in 1976 during her first sailing aboard Carnival Cruises’ Mardi Gras. Twenty years later, she began her freelance cruise writing gig and, since that time, has covered mass market, ultra-premium, riverboat and expedition ships for regional, national and international publications as well as cruise websites.

Laurel and Charles Doherty

Photographers/journalists Laurel and Charles Doherty were bitten by the travel bug while on sabbatical in India after completing college. Since then, they’ve sailed all seven seas and explored all seven continents, facilitated by Charles’s decades at the helm of Cruise Travel, “The Worldwide Cruise Vacation Magazine.”

Jackie Sheckler Finch

Jackie Sheckler Finch wrote her first cruise story in 1976 aboard the inaugural voyage of the Mississippi Queen. She has been writing about cruises ever since. Jackie also has been a newspaper reporter in Ohio, Massachusetts and Indiana since 1978 and has been writing for The Herald-Times in her Hoosier hometown of Bloomington since 1989. Sharing her love of travel, she has written 25 travel guidebooks for Globe Pequot Press. A member of The Society of American Travel Writers and Midwest Travel Journalists Association, Jackie has been named the MTJA Mark Twain Travel Writer of the Year a record six times, most recently in 2023. One of her greatest joys is boarding a ship to discover what lies around the next river bend or beyond the ocean horizon.

Dana Freeman

Dana Freeman is a Vermont-based freelance travel writer focusing on luxury small-ship cruises. Her smallest voyage to date was on a Barge in France with only six passengers. She is a regular feature writer for ClubLife Magazine. Her work also appears in CNN Travel, Porthole Magazine, Thrillist, Forbes Travel Guide, and others.

Charlie and Sherrie Funk

Charlie & Sherrie Funk ran Just Cruisin’ Plus for 40 years. It all started when Sherrie Funk started the first cruise-only travel agency in Tennessee in 1988. Her husband, Charlie Funk, joined her full-time in 1993. Today, they are nationally known trainers and speakers sharing their travel tips and insights, and were named to the Cruise Line International Association Hall of Fame in 2012. Today they operate CSF Travel Consulting.

Sarah Greaves Gabbadon

Sarah Greaves-Gabbadon is a Caribbean travel expert, award-winning travel journalist, and on-camera host, who ventures to the beach and beyond to share the diverse cultures and colorful people of the world’s favorite warm-weather destination. Sarah also loves exploring the historic cities and breathtaking natural places of Europe. Follow her adventures on JetSetSarah.com and on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @JetSetSarah.

Matt Hannafin

Matt Hannafin is a writer, editor, and musician based in Portland, Oregon. A former senior editor and author for Frommer’s Travel Guides, he’s written hundreds of articles for magazines, newspapers, and the web, and in 2010 was honored with a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism award.

Anne Kalosh

Anne Kalosh has written about cruises for decades and her favorites involve small ships. She is the editor of Seatrade-Cruise.com and senior associate editor of Seatrade Cruise Review.

Peter Knego

Peter Knego is a cruise journalist, as well as a historian and collector of ocean liner fittings and art (see his www.midshipcentury.com). He writes for top cruise and travel pubs, including USA Today, Travel Weekly and Ships Monthly, and has been interviewed and quoted as an expert in The New York Times, SeaTrade Insider and others.

Sharon Kurtz

Sharon Kurtz is an Austin, Texas based travel writer and passionate world explorer. With a focus on cruising, outdoor adventures, and bucket-list experiences, Sharon’s stories ignite wanderlust and inspire authentic, independent travel.

Tim and Elise Lentz

Tim and Elise Lentz have specialized in leading groups on cruise ships and riverboats as a husband and wife tour director team for more than 15 years, through their company Global Tour Management. They chucked their corporate careers, got certified as tour managers, and were hired for the same small ship company they had vacationed on. Elise has written a series of stories about their experiences at sea.

Elysa Leonard

Elysa Leonard is a scuba diver who sure knows her tropical fish — she can identify more than 100 kinds. Writing about diving and snorkeling while on a small-ship cruise is her new nirvana.

Ben Lyons

Ben Lyons has been obsessed with ships since he was five years old. Since then, he has spent almost every waking moment figuring out how to spend more time at sea.

Robin McKelvie

Robin McKelvie is a Scottish based travel writer and broadcaster specialising in cruises, especially small ships. A native Scot, Robin has been published across five continents in magazines and newspapers including CNN Traveller.

Randy Mink

Randy Mink has taken 40 cruises during his many years as a professional travel writer. He has served as associate editor of Cruise Travel Magazine since 1991 and in 2017 took over as editor. Randy also is managing editor of Leisure Group Travel and other travel trade magazines published by Premier Travel Media.

Sandra and John Nowlan

Sandra and John Nowlan, based in the port city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, have been active travel and food writers for almost 20 years. They’ve now visited all seven continents, more than 120 countries and enjoyed 77 ocean, river and expedition cruises.

John Roberts

John Roberts is a freelance writer and operator of InTheLoopTravel.com. He writes about cruising and active travel, and is QuirkyCruise's resident small-ship cruising fitness reporter!

bio pic writer katherine rodeghier with tulips at keukenhof copy

Kathy Rodeghier

Katherine Rodeghier has traveled to nearly 100 countries and cruised across the globe with stops in all seven continents. She’s had close encounters with penguins in Antarctica and tortoises in the Galapagos Islands, joined a King crab safari in Norway, bicycled along a canal on a barge cruise in France, cruised to Casablanca on a vintage sailing ship, and sipped spiced wine at Christmas markets on a cruise on the Danube. Her travel journalism career began in suburban Chicago writing and editing an award-winning newspaper travel section for the Daily Herald. She’s a long-standing member of the Society of American Travel Writers.

Lynn-Cele Seldon

Seldon Ink is the travel journalist team of Lynn and Cele Seldon. Lynn brings their travels to life in words and pictures, while Cele, after a corporate marketing career, writes, edits, shoots, and handles marketing and research. In their 25-year career, they have taken 100+ cruises and have written for more than 200 publications, including Cruise Travel, CruiseCritic, and others. Follow them @Seldon Ink on Twitter & Instagram.

Gene Sloan

Gene Sloan has written about travel for nearly three decades, with a longtime focus on cruising. He spent more than 20 years as a travel writer and editor at USA TODAY, where he co-founded the paper’s travel section and later founded and ran its online cruise site. At last count, he’d sailed on nearly 150 ships. Follow Gene on Twitter at CruiseLog & Instagram!

Richard White

Richard White is a freelance polar expedition leader and guide, working mostly these days for EYOS, a purveyor of luxury yacht cruises to the world’s most coveted and remote places. In the past he’s also guided for Lindblad Expeditions. Richard’s an accomplished photographer and lecturer, with an expertise in ornithology and marine biology.

Karl Zimmermann

Karl Zimmermann has written about ships, trains, and other travel subjects for newspapers across the country, from the New York Times and Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times, and for numerous magazines — hundreds of articles in all, to go with his 24 books.