living on a sailboat:
Having finally finished my undergrad at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, I had an open slate and was antsy in my pants to live a life of adventure. My mother gifted me $10k as a graduation gift & while others may have invested it or paid down student loans (wise choices, for sure, but you won’t find them here), I bought a sailboat.
My original plan had been to apply for jobs at a wildlife refuge in Africa, but as luck would have it, I fell in love and my plans became talks of our plans. Sitting in the world famous Saltana Bar in Williams, Arizona one night, I brought up my lifelong dream of living on a sailboat, more as a lark than anything else.
Three months later, I sold everything except for my Tacoma, which drove my partner & I across the country from Arizona to Florida, living in my truck in the interim, while we searched for a sailboat.
After about a month, we were tired of living in the Taco and found a boat in the Florida Keys, where we moved aboard the night we bought it. With neither of us having any sailing experience, we had our work cut out for us to say the least. While we had been learning about sailing and boats through books, as we came to discover, there’s no way to prepare you for the realities of maritime-life. While living on the boat, we taught ourselves how to sail, how to painstakingly keep a boat and diesel engine running, and how to respect the ocean.
Our 25’ Erikson -a day sailboat, really, but we were ignorant at the time- was too small for us to sleep in the birth (bed), so we slept separately on the seti (seats). It was an extremely modest boat and even more modest living conditions; no refrigeration (we had a mediocre ice box that held ice for half a day), no heat or air conditioning (of course, this is blue-collar sailing after all), no shower aboard, no bedroom (birth), and ultimately no space. Was it the kind of boat you should be living on; nope. What about the kind of boat to go on a three month off-shore journey on; hell no. Did we do it anyway? Without a doubt.
After a year of living aboard and sailing the boat on trips up and down the Keys and around Florida, the time came to cross the Gulf Stream and cruise into the Caribbean.
The preparation needed to get a day-sailor ready for a summer of remote-tropical-island-hopping was comical. Even better, are the stories we have of near-death experiences, lucid-dreams of private coves and islands all to ourselves, and everything from misery and terror to blissed-out euphoria. That is live aboard cruising, my friend.
We spent three months island hopping around the Bahamas and Exumas, but had the poor luck of going during a particularly active hurricane season. Many of our days were spent enduring intimidating storms, sometimes even narrowly escaping death (truly), and having the adventure of a lifetime.
“It’s not an adventure until something goes wrong.” -Yvon Chouinard.
We learned a lot about ourselves and one another, and even eloped in a secluded harbor along the way, with local residents as our wedding guests and a Bahamian marriage officiant who had to hitch hike to get to the cove our boat was anchored in.
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Also, below is a button to the old blog I kept during this period with some additional photos, stories and videos of that experience. It’s pretty basic, but that was the day of blogs.