Home by the sea: what it's like to live on a boat and travel around the world

You don't have to be rich to be an ocean traveler. Many families have settled on boats and travel all over the world. TheGuardian.

Photo: IStock

As a girl growing up in the landlocked city of Kunming in southern China, Nadiyana Na heard a story about a woman who lived alone on a boat in the Caribbean. “Every day she would wake up and climb up the mast to dive into this very blue sea for her morning swim,” Nadiyana, 27, said. “For years I wanted to be that girl.” When Nadiyana met and fell in love with 31-year-old Mark Farnworth, a young man from Preston who taught English as a foreign language at a school in Kunming, the sticker on his bedhead was a reminder of Nadiyana's childhood interests. The sticker, illustrated with images of dolphins and tropical islands, read: “Would you like to sail around the world with me?”

“It was an advertisement for a sailing team,” explains Mark. “I saw it on a lamppost in Thailand and I liked it.” But for Nadiana it was fate.”

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Five years later, Nadiyana and Mark are permanently at sea on a "previously rotting" 34-foot 1975 catamaran that they restored with online tutorials and maintain a low-key lifestyle through the Wildlings Sailing YouTube channel (60 subscribers), which details their encounters with the inhospitable sea, engine failure, and bemused nudist bathers.

“We live on about $6 a day,” says Nadiyana. “Part of our philosophy is that our life can be accessible to everyone, not just the super rich.”

Over the past few years, the number of lovers to live on boats has increased. The pandemic, which has caused both fantasies of escape and a reassessment of the life we ​​lived in 2019, has reinforced these trends, with large boat sales up 18% in 2020 (compared to 2019, latest data available), according to industry body british marine; and SE Yachts, which sells 34- to 46-foot boats to the UK market, saw a 2021% increase in sales in 50.

Tim Geisler runs Nautilus Sailing, an intensive sailing school for future offshore liveaboards, with his wife Rosanna in Colorado. “Requests for our services are up 100% compared to pre-pandemic levels,” he says. “Our clients saw the sea safari lifestyle on YouTube channels, many of these channels have millions of viewers, and they thought, 'You know what: I could live like that!' Customer demographics have also changed, Geisler notes. “A few years ago it was older people, but now 70% of our clients are between 35 and 55 years old,” he says.

Melissa Bennington, 35, husband Andy Turner, 48, and son Jack, nine, plan to live permanently aboard a 40s 1980-foot steel sailing yacht from this fall. The family is doing an environmental upgrade (converting a diesel engine to run on lithium batteries) in Holyhead, North Wales. “Life on board is 90% commonplace, 5% horror and 5% the most beautiful experience we have ever had,” says Melissa.

Andy, a paramedic, has been a hobby sailor for 20 years and has long dreamed of living on board full-time. When he met Melissa, a travel booking agent, in 2018, they were drawn together by a shared dream of adventure around the world. “That was the key moment,” says Andy.

The Turners-Benningtons plan to pass through the French canal system and then continue across the coast of Portugal and North Africa west across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. The route will take them to the winter climate of the Caribbean.

Melissa will homeschool Jack while they travel. The family is busy creating remote networks among fellow travelers for home schooling. “There is a huge community of families from Britain who ended up in the Caribbean because of Brexit, so we plan to meet for lessons on the beach,” she says. The new rule only allows Britons to be in Schengen waters for 90 out of 180 days.

Jan Poole, 57, and his partner Natalie Bannister, 44, met in Mallorca in 2018, where Natalie worked as a yachtsman. Both experienced sailors, they performed the nautical stunt for the Bond film No Time to Die. They have been in life-at-sea mode since 2019 on a 1970s teak-panelled yacht Jan restored in the 2000s between jobs in the merchant marine. Today, the pair run a YouTube channel, S/V Blown Away, where their years of sailing experience and down-to-earth stories about the less glamorous aspects of cruising make them a favorite among aspiring sailors.

“We remind you that people who live in Britain are quite laid back,” says Melissa. “God help you if you're looking to cook something fancy in a swaying kitchen,” they note. And shopping for basic groceries is a “full day event.” “You have to get on your boat, get to shore and then get to the supermarket, which is usually at the far end of town,” explains Natalie. “In addition to your purchases, you may need a 20-liter can of fuel.”

The couple are currently in Greece, a "sea country" they adore for its free mooring and warm welcome to boat travelers. They were anchored on the small island of Meganisi when Covid hit, where Ian says "they treated us like family" but are planning a cruise towards Turkey. “Many travelers want to travel around the world in five years or so,” says Natalie. “But we like to experience new places rather than just mindlessly travel around the globe.”

Liz Earl, 34, from Nuneaton joined the crew of the Sailing SV Delos in 2017. Earl joined the Delos team.

She crossed the South Atlantic on a 53-foot yacht and in 2018 bought her own boat and traveled the Caribbean with her then-partner and then as a solo traveler.

“People watch YouTube and think sailing life means drinking rum and coconut water on deck,” she says. — But there are also disadvantages: exploding toilets, rats and cockroaches; salt is in absolutely everything.” She adds that lone sea travelers have another noticeable pest. “I’ve lost count of the number of men who try to explain what to do with my lines (the ropes that moor the ship),” she says.

Liz is also dismayed by what she sees as a retrograde division of labor among heterosexual couples living on boats, with women typically taking charge of the galley and men taking on the boat work. “There seems to be a perception that women are incapable of doing boat work, but that’s not true,” she says.

For Liz, who works as an illustrator and is thinking about painting her current home, a canal boat called the Leviathan, pale pink "like a giant penis," the lifestyle on board is about "not being obligated to one man”, be it a man or a partner on whom she depends. “In this life, you are not stuck in a mortgage trap, and tomorrow your house may be somewhere else,” she explains.

Helen and Jamie Lockhart, 38 and 54, used to own a fish and chip shop near Portsmouth but have spent the last two and a half years aboard their 42 1988ft Bavaria yacht with their sons Louis, 16, and Max, 12 . The family has sailed 2000 nautical miles along the Portuguese and Spanish coasts and plans to cross the Atlantic later this year.

“Running a chip shop for 15 years means you spend a lot of hours looking out of the same 2m by 2m window,” says Jamie. — After a while, life became a little ordinary. I wanted the kids to see more of life.” The family sold the business and signed up for a yacht charter holiday, where they met a British family who had circumnavigated the world on a catamaran. “They gave us a lot of advice and said, 'Just go for it,'” Helen recalls.

The interconnectedness of the global boat travel community came as a surprise to Lockhearts. “There's a website called No Fly Land where you can enter your boat details and see who's on board, as well as track and contact other boats,” says Helen. “We use this a lot.”

This has been a great boon for her children, especially Louis, who misses growing up surrounded by peers. “Finding friends when you live on board is the biggest challenge,” Louis says, adding that a “decent data package” allows him and his brother Max to keep in touch with friends around the world.

Helen recognizes that it is a life that can be harsh and that living in a confined space with a growing family or partner can be a shock to the system. “It takes you back to the basics of material survival,” she says. “And, without exaggeration, something breaks every single day: whether it’s the fuel, the pump, or something stupid like a faucet washer.”

Jan and Natalie call the rows of abandoned yachts deep in the shipyards "dream cemeteries." “I have seen time and again people run out of money or get scared and forced to give up this lifestyle,” Yang says of the prospects for thousands of aspiring pandemic-inspired boat travelers. However, little can bring the couple back to land-based life - not even Jan's two young grandchildren, who he hopes will one day enjoy visiting their seafaring grandfather. “We have no debt, no pressure, no schedules, and I can’t remember the last time I wore anything other than shorts and T-shirts,” Yang says.

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The Lockharts, too, remain at sea, they say, for the foreseeable future, although Louis' university plans could be a turning point.

“We only have one life, don't we? says Helen. “Who wants to spend that life in an office working for someone else—or, for that matter, frying chips?”

Nadiyana fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming a Caribbean sailor. In 2021, she and Mark found themselves anchored in the Mediterranean. “One moment it’s life or death, and the next you’re looking at this landscape that’s so beautiful you could cry,” she says. “It’s like a very concentrated life.” It's like we're really alive."

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