Making Sense of a Life at Sea

Last year I made an extremely difficult decision: I left a four-year relationship with a man and a seven-year relationship with a lifestyle. Boat life had come to define me. I was introduced as “Emma, my friend (daughter, granddaughter, niece) who is sailing around the world”.  I was terrified to walk away from seven years of incomparable freedom; of living at the whim of the elements, of a comfortable home with a new backyard each day. It is essentially all my adult self has known, the scaffolding of my existence.  But I was clinging too tightly to that limiting identity of “boat Emma” and needed space to extricate my self-worth from those sea roving years.

It was 2015. I was twenty-one, fresh out of college, and in search of adventure. Thankfully, I was also naïve. And brave; but maybe the bravery fell beneath the umbrella of naïveté. I hopped aboard a 35’ cutter in Half Moon Bay and headed South, switching boats in San Diego, and continuing through Mexico. I carried on and made the crossing to the Marquesas aboard a 30’ steel gaff-rigged ketch. It was slow (48 days), but I was hooked. I had entered the alternate reality of being a tiny speck in the middle of a vast ocean. This venture began to feel less like a trip, and more like a lifestyle. I loved having only time and nowhere to go, nowhere to be, no one to be. Oh, how I wrote, read and drew.

After a few thousand more nautical miles, I arrived in New Zealand where I met the man with whom I would sail for another four years aboard a 1980 Amel Sharki. We slowly worked our way North to the Philippines, and I slowly fell in love with Phil and his unparalleled zest for life. We traversed Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, landing in South Africa just in time for the pandemic. We crossed the Atlantic from Namibia to Suriname one year later, and in Grenada I decided it was time for me to make a change.

I spent this past year feeling quite unmoored. I struggled with adjusting back to life on land and constantly wondered if I had made a great mistake walking away from my little floating home and the thrilling variability of life aboard. Why would I give up spearfishing on uninhabited Micronesian atolls and summiting active Vanuatuan volcanoes to peer down at roiling lava a thousand feet below? Why would I trade traversing oceans for sitting in traffic? Because something was missing. I was unsettled, and often unhappy. A year of foundering and sitting with my thoughts, with myself, and I’ve arrived at some semblance of clarity. This winter, I started crafting distinctive, durable bags from upcycled sailcloth and leather under my brand name Landfall Leatherworks. This is my landfall; the tangible result of my desire to make sense of, and make something of, my years at sea. And what better place to start than right here in Sausalito’s historic working waterfront?

I may no longer know what phase the moon is in or what the tides are doing, but I’m enjoying a newfound settledness. I recognize that my cruising life will always be a part of me, but that it does not define me. When I think back on those years, the sensation and mindset of longer ocean passages is the most striking, most foreign of all my experiences. It is the most distilled version of living I have known – where life becomes not about “doing” or “accomplishing” but about “being”, in a grand space of sea and sky with a fluid sense of time. My journals bring it all flooding back:

“The sickle moon set early allowing the starlight to go unchallenged. The brightest reflected, multiplied on the prism-like ripples covering the long period ground swell. We’ve lost the wind. The squawks of red-footed boobies and white-tailed tropicbirds crack the silence. I glimpse their flapping shadowforms only occasionally against the inky murk. This is the hardest part, the stagnation and complete inability to change our circumstances. The feeling of human agency disappears when the wind does. And the hours of waiting begin while land sits there 800 miles away, not growing any closer. I forget to notice how beautiful this liquid desert is, how metamorphic. That no one has ever been here, right here. That right here never looks the same. That its mood will never again be what it is right now: cerulean sky, ourselves perched in an amphitheater of squalls, billowing white clouds with flat grey bottoms leveled as far as the eye can see, some venting slanting rain showers like gauzy cement rhombuses.” (17-day passage from Addu, Maldives to Victoria, Seychelles)

I hope I can hang on to that slowness, that focused observation of the present moment, while I embark on this new voyage. I know it’s in me. And I know I’ll head back out there, someday.

Published in Latitude 38 Magazine, Volume 551, May, 2023