|
MereTraxTracking Individual Adventures |
|
Our Story
Why we built MereTrax — and where it has taken us.
The Story
Some people are born with wanderlust. Seaton was born into it.
He grew up in Weston, Massachusetts — already selling snacks and pencils to his classmates, already restless — in a family where the sea was never far from the conversation. His father, Ranulf, was an MIT engineer who had worked on the NASA and Apollo programs. A serious sailor. And in 1969, Ranulf made a decision: he would step away from his demanding career to see the world with his family. He purchased a 60-foot 1946 Philip Rhodes ketch called the Merry Maiden, and on October 26th of that year, Ranulf, his wife Ann, and three of their children — Robn, Seaton (age 13), and Adrian — pointed her bow south from Salem, Massachusetts. They didn't come back for nearly six years.
THE MERRY MAIDEN
The boat has a story of her own. Designed by Philip Rhodes — one of the great naval architects of the 20th century — and built at the Palmer Scott Yard in New Bedford, Massachusetts, she was first owned by Irving Pratt, Commodore of the New York Yacht Club, who raced her to Bermuda five times and won her class in 1948. By the time Ranulf bought her in 1969, she had already logged tens of thousands of ocean miles. She was about to log tens of thousands more.
The family sailed through the Caribbean, stopping in St. Thomas. They transited the Panama Canal in February 1971, trading the Atlantic for the Pacific in a single afternoon. They crossed to Pago Pago in American Samoa — where, in the middle of the Pacific, Robn left the boat to marry a German sailor she had met along the way. They continued to Wallis & Futuna, a French territory so remote that most people couldn't find it on a map if asked. They crossed the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, came back up through the South Atlantic, and finally made landfall in the Caribbean before turning north for home.
In the summer of 1975, the Merry Maiden came to rest in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Seaton was nineteen. He had spent more than a third of his life at sea.
AT THE HELM
Most people, having done that, would spend the rest of their lives telling the story. Seaton went back for more.
In 1976, he borrowed the Merry Maiden from his father and set sail again from Salem. He was twenty years old and his own captain. The voyage that followed lasted seven years.
He sailed south through the Caribbean — Puerto Rico, Antigua, Curaçao — then west across open ocean. He made landfall at Rapa Nui. Easter Island sits 2,300 miles from the nearest continent, reachable only by aircraft or by sea. The stone Moai stand with their backs to the water, facing inland, watching. Seaton kept going.
His next landfall was Pitcairn Island.
If you don't know Pitcairn, it is the most remote inhabited island on Earth — a volcanic outcrop in the South Pacific, home to fewer than fifty people. They are all descended from Fletcher Christian and the other Bounty mutineers who settled there in 1790 after burning the ship in the bay where Seaton anchored in December 1977. Bounty Bay. Fewer people visit Pitcairn by sea in a year than summit Everest.
From Pitcairn, he sailed west to New Zealand. North of Auckland, in 1978, he met Pam. [Seaton — add the story here.]
The Pacific voyages continued. Vanuatu in 1981. Kiribati, straddling the equator in the dead center of the ocean, the same year. The Merry Maiden eventually came to rest in Seattle, completing a seven-year Pacific crossing — twice over.
The boat has now sailed an estimated 300,000 miles in her lifetime. Much of that was Gras family miles. Seaton has been restoring her for twenty years — a labor of love for a vessel that is, by any measure, irreplaceable.
ON LAND
The sea teaches patience, improvisation, and the ability to fix things with whatever is at hand. Seaton applied all three on shore.
He started a mobile boat repair operation. He sold alternative energy heat pumps. He built a manufacturing facility for solar energy systems at a time when solar was still a fringe idea. And then he invented something that caught the world's attention: the world's first refrigerant recovery device — a machine from his company, Global Ozone Solutions, Inc., that captured refrigerants before they could escape into the atmosphere and damage the ozone layer. The New York Times wrote about it. So did the Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur Magazine. During his 1992 presidential primary campaign, Governor Bill Clinton visited Seaton's operation to recognize his environmental contribution.
THE UNITED NATIONS
In 1993, Seaton took his environmental expertise to the international stage. As a UN Environmental Protection consultant, he traveled to Durban, to Zurich, to Vienna — where the United Nations operates its third-largest office complex — and to Budapest, then newly emerged from the Cold War. He developed environmental initiatives for Zimbabwe and the Seychelles. The following year found him in Africa again.
THE TECHNOLOGY CHAPTER
Back in Seattle, Seaton built a semantic search engine focused on child safety online. He holds patents for a data access system. In 2009, he founded SURF Incubator at 999 Third Avenue in downtown Seattle — a startup hub and community that has now supported more than fifty companies over fifteen years. He traveled to San Francisco to connect with RocketSpace. He visited the New York Yacht Club — the same institution where the Merry Maiden's first owner had once served as Commodore — closing a loop across half a century of one boat's history.
He navigated COVID. He is currently developing mobile applications for visually impaired users and building websites to support refugees.
WHY MERETRAX
After 150,000 miles of recorded travel across five-plus decades — and that's just what made it into the database — Seaton wanted a way to hold all of it in one place. Not just the coordinates, but the meaning. The name of the bay where the Bounty burned. The year he met Pam. The layover in Durban. The afternoon in Vienna.
MereTrax began as a personal project: a map with lines on it. It became something more — a tool for anyone who travels with intention and wants to remember where they've been, and why it mattered.
The lines on the map don't explain themselves. That's what the story is for.
TODAY
Seaton lives on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains, a short distance from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There is usually a boat nearby. The water is always visible.
He is still going. Early 2026: a Seahawks game, a train from Boston to the Pacific, home again to the Peninsula.
The map keeps growing.
He grew up in Weston, Massachusetts — already selling snacks and pencils to his classmates, already restless — in a family where the sea was never far from the conversation. His father, Ranulf, was an MIT engineer who had worked on the NASA and Apollo programs. A serious sailor. And in 1969, Ranulf made a decision: he would step away from his demanding career to see the world with his family. He purchased a 60-foot 1946 Philip Rhodes ketch called the Merry Maiden, and on October 26th of that year, Ranulf, his wife Ann, and three of their children — Robn, Seaton (age 13), and Adrian — pointed her bow south from Salem, Massachusetts. They didn't come back for nearly six years.
THE MERRY MAIDEN
The boat has a story of her own. Designed by Philip Rhodes — one of the great naval architects of the 20th century — and built at the Palmer Scott Yard in New Bedford, Massachusetts, she was first owned by Irving Pratt, Commodore of the New York Yacht Club, who raced her to Bermuda five times and won her class in 1948. By the time Ranulf bought her in 1969, she had already logged tens of thousands of ocean miles. She was about to log tens of thousands more.
The family sailed through the Caribbean, stopping in St. Thomas. They transited the Panama Canal in February 1971, trading the Atlantic for the Pacific in a single afternoon. They crossed to Pago Pago in American Samoa — where, in the middle of the Pacific, Robn left the boat to marry a German sailor she had met along the way. They continued to Wallis & Futuna, a French territory so remote that most people couldn't find it on a map if asked. They crossed the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, came back up through the South Atlantic, and finally made landfall in the Caribbean before turning north for home.
In the summer of 1975, the Merry Maiden came to rest in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Seaton was nineteen. He had spent more than a third of his life at sea.
AT THE HELM
Most people, having done that, would spend the rest of their lives telling the story. Seaton went back for more.
In 1976, he borrowed the Merry Maiden from his father and set sail again from Salem. He was twenty years old and his own captain. The voyage that followed lasted seven years.
He sailed south through the Caribbean — Puerto Rico, Antigua, Curaçao — then west across open ocean. He made landfall at Rapa Nui. Easter Island sits 2,300 miles from the nearest continent, reachable only by aircraft or by sea. The stone Moai stand with their backs to the water, facing inland, watching. Seaton kept going.
His next landfall was Pitcairn Island.
If you don't know Pitcairn, it is the most remote inhabited island on Earth — a volcanic outcrop in the South Pacific, home to fewer than fifty people. They are all descended from Fletcher Christian and the other Bounty mutineers who settled there in 1790 after burning the ship in the bay where Seaton anchored in December 1977. Bounty Bay. Fewer people visit Pitcairn by sea in a year than summit Everest.
From Pitcairn, he sailed west to New Zealand. North of Auckland, in 1978, he met Pam. [Seaton — add the story here.]
The Pacific voyages continued. Vanuatu in 1981. Kiribati, straddling the equator in the dead center of the ocean, the same year. The Merry Maiden eventually came to rest in Seattle, completing a seven-year Pacific crossing — twice over.
The boat has now sailed an estimated 300,000 miles in her lifetime. Much of that was Gras family miles. Seaton has been restoring her for twenty years — a labor of love for a vessel that is, by any measure, irreplaceable.
ON LAND
The sea teaches patience, improvisation, and the ability to fix things with whatever is at hand. Seaton applied all three on shore.
He started a mobile boat repair operation. He sold alternative energy heat pumps. He built a manufacturing facility for solar energy systems at a time when solar was still a fringe idea. And then he invented something that caught the world's attention: the world's first refrigerant recovery device — a machine from his company, Global Ozone Solutions, Inc., that captured refrigerants before they could escape into the atmosphere and damage the ozone layer. The New York Times wrote about it. So did the Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur Magazine. During his 1992 presidential primary campaign, Governor Bill Clinton visited Seaton's operation to recognize his environmental contribution.
THE UNITED NATIONS
In 1993, Seaton took his environmental expertise to the international stage. As a UN Environmental Protection consultant, he traveled to Durban, to Zurich, to Vienna — where the United Nations operates its third-largest office complex — and to Budapest, then newly emerged from the Cold War. He developed environmental initiatives for Zimbabwe and the Seychelles. The following year found him in Africa again.
THE TECHNOLOGY CHAPTER
Back in Seattle, Seaton built a semantic search engine focused on child safety online. He holds patents for a data access system. In 2009, he founded SURF Incubator at 999 Third Avenue in downtown Seattle — a startup hub and community that has now supported more than fifty companies over fifteen years. He traveled to San Francisco to connect with RocketSpace. He visited the New York Yacht Club — the same institution where the Merry Maiden's first owner had once served as Commodore — closing a loop across half a century of one boat's history.
He navigated COVID. He is currently developing mobile applications for visually impaired users and building websites to support refugees.
WHY MERETRAX
After 150,000 miles of recorded travel across five-plus decades — and that's just what made it into the database — Seaton wanted a way to hold all of it in one place. Not just the coordinates, but the meaning. The name of the bay where the Bounty burned. The year he met Pam. The layover in Durban. The afternoon in Vienna.
MereTrax began as a personal project: a map with lines on it. It became something more — a tool for anyone who travels with intention and wants to remember where they've been, and why it mattered.
The lines on the map don't explain themselves. That's what the story is for.
TODAY
Seaton lives on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains, a short distance from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There is usually a boat nearby. The water is always visible.
He is still going. Early 2026: a Seahawks game, a train from Boston to the Pacific, home again to the Peninsula.
The map keeps growing.
The Map
Copyright 2013 - 2026 Seaton Gras, all rights reserved.