Kristofer and Rebecca were married in 1988 and by May 1989 Kristofer was working for Youth For Christ as a camping director. For six years Kristofer took troubled boys, many of them court referrals, on backpacking trips throughout the summer in the mountains of Wyoming. During the school year he would facilitate groups for at risk kids in the schools and do after school groups with boys who were in crisis at home. Rebecca worked with girls in the same situations.

There came a point in 1992 when Kristofer realized that although boys were coming to Christ throughout the summer, most of them were going right back into the same home life and back to the same friends and soon would stop coming to the winter follow up groups. Kristofer decided to extend his backpacking trips from seven day trips to 10, 14, and 28 day trips. He called these trips, Impact trips, in the hopes that they would have a real IMPACT on the lives of the boys.

In the summer of 1994 after a 28 day Impact trip two of the boys from that trip who were in trouble (one had been permanently kicked out of the public schools and the other had been permanently kicked out of his home) came to live with Kristofer and Rebecca. A friend of Kristofer’s came to live with them to home school the boys. This experience was so rewarding that Kristofer, Rebecca, and Jeff all felt moved by God to start a boys home.

Kristofer approached the board of directors for Casper Youth for Christ with the proposal to start a boy’s home in Casper, Wyoming. They felt that the liability was to great for them so Kristofer and Rebecca began to search for God’s will in this. By October that year a Youth Foundation in Montana had hired them to start a boys’ home in Whitefish. They sold their house in Wyoming and moved everything they owned into a small (18 foot) travel trailer and with their 2 year old son, Jimmy, moved in December to Montana. Just outside Missoula, Montana a wind hit the trailer and flipped it and their Ford Explorer over on the interstate. Rebecca was driving and Jimmy was in the passenger seat. Kristofer was driving their little Land Cruiser in front and saw it all.

Their trailer and Explorer were totaled but God had completely protected both Rebecca and Jimmy. They had lost everything except the Land cruiser and when they arrived in Whitefish the Board informed them that the Youth foundation had been supported by one business and that business was about to go bankrupt. Kristofer, Rebecca and Jeff all believed that God had called them to this new ministry so they persisted and eventually were invited to move to the other side of the mountains to the little farming community of Fort Benton. By the next summer they had 3 new boys and lived on an old farm on the prairie. Three years later they had 16 boys and another family helping them. In 1999 they moved into a bigger house just 10 miles from where they had been living. They had 10 boys at the time and everyone worked hard to rebuild parts of the house making a school and a library.

Throughout all of these years Kristofer and Rebecca continued to grow as a family, they now had five children of their own, Jimmy, EmilyAnne, Kanyon, Kaleb, and Benny.

Kristofer continued to take boys on high adventure backpacking trips in the mountains of Wyoming and Montana as well as two trips every year to hike in the Grand Canyon. He also bought 13 sea kayaks and began doing annual sea kayaking trips to British Columbia. It was on the first of these trips that Kristofer developed a desire to sail. He would look at the sailboats anchored in the little bays where the boys were camping in tents and dream about the possibilities. In 2000 Kristofer, Rebecca, Jonathan, (a friend of theirs from Wyoming), and one of the boys chartered a sailboat in Washington and took the first three courses offered by the American Sailing Association. Later that summer they brought 5 more boys out on another charter and the boys took basic sailing courses while Kristofer, Rebecca, and Jonathan took the rest of the courses offered by ASA.

Those trips confirmed what Kristofer had come to believe after years of wilderness experience with troubled boys. These trips built relationships and self-confidence in the boys. The close proximity and working of the boat required teamwork and fostered a natural discipline and self-reliance. Young people today have substituted their personal dreams for Television shows and video game experience has taken the place of real life adventure. Adventure trips are like a jump start for dreams. Kids who have no personal goals or wild dreams for their future, or have given in to the lie that they will just turn out like the rest of their siblings or even their parents, experience new, real adventure, they climb real mountains, hike into the deepest canyon on earth, paddle a kayak through the morning fog along a tree lined mountain, look all the way around a sailboat, heeled over in the wind, and see nothing but ocean with no land in sight, and in all of these experiences success is their only option because by the very nature of what they are doing the price of failure is too high to consider.

Later that summer the parents of one of those boys was so impressed with the changes they had witnessed in their son that they offered $20,000 to Kristofer and Rebecca to use for a down payment on their own boat to be used for ministry with troubled boys. Their friend Jonathan also donated an additional $10,000 to be used for upgrades.

In April of 2001 Kristofer and two of the boys, Harrison and Adam, flew to Florida to take possession of “Wandering Dolphin.” She is a 47 foot custom built aluminum cutter. She was designed by legendary race boat designer Gary Mull and has a very unique flush deck design that gives her a lot of room below. She has two aft staterooms, the port stateroom has bunk beds and the starboard has a double berth. There are also two pilot berths in the salon and the table drops to make an additional bed. There is a very roomy head and a V-berth as well.

Kristofer, Harry, and Adam sailed Wandering Dolphin to the Bahamas and she was used with troubled boys there until 2004. She was docked in Lucaya on Grand Bahamas when both hurricane Francis and then Jeanne hit the island. The combined effort of these hurricanes totaled the boat. Kristofer used the insurance money to buy back the boat as salvage from the insurance company and the rest to fix the damage.

In January of 2006 Kristofer and Rebecca hired John and Jenny Leak, friends who had been coming to the farm helping for years, to run the operation at the farm while they moved their own family and two troubled boys onto Wandering Dolphin. The plan was to spend half the year on the boat with boys from the farm and the other half in Montana helping with the operation of the boys home.

John and Jen had sold almost all of their possessions, moved to Montana, and began to interview boys. By the end of March they had two new boys and were excited about their new role in the ministry.

In April the new boys burned the farm to the ground.

John and Jen ended up moving back to Calgary to live with his folks. The experience took such a toll on John that he still has not fully recovered.

Kristofer and Rebecca chose to sail back to the US, ending up in Charleston, SC to regroup and pray for God’s guidance for their future.

When they arrived in Charleston they still had two boys on the boat. Jake went home to attend school but Sergei stayed with Kristofer and Rebecca for the entire year in Charleston. Sergei finished his home schooling and has now moved on.

Kristofer and Rebecca have decide to continue to take young people on the boat for the foreseeable future. They will take young people, both boys and girls but not at the same time) for three month blocks: