March 12, 2023

While cruising around the world for seven years, Emma Casey got used to having plenty of free time on her hands. Surrounded by just sea and sky for days on end, she took the time to appreciate the chance to slow down and connect with nature. She wrote, read, cooked, drew and sewed, an activity she learned during her childhood in Woodacre. And on one trip from Mexico to the Marquesas, she transformed the scraps of a tanbark sail into her take on a classic sailor’s ditty bag…

May 1, 2023

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.

June 27, 2023

Navigating Fashion: Smithies Create

Shortly after graduating from Smith, Emma Casey ’15 boarded a sailboat in California and headed south by west.When she finally decided to drop anchor and settle down, she founded Landfall Leatherworks, handcrafting distinctive, durable bags from upcycled sails and leather at her workshop in Sausalito, California. “There’s a whimsical idea of the sails having been on voyages,” she says. “They each have a history ingrained in their fabric.”

August 1, 2023

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.