As a girl growing up in landlocked Kunming in south China, Nadiyana Na heard a story about a woman who lived alone on a boat in the Caribbean. “She woke up every day and climbed the mast to dive into this very blue sea for her morning bathe,” Nadiyana, 27, tells me. “For years I wanted to be that girl.” When Nadiyana met and fell in love with Mark Farnworth, 31, a young man from Preston who was teaching English as a foreign language at a school in Kunming, a sticker on the head of his bed called to mind Nadiyana’s childhood preoccupation. Illustrated with pictures of dolphins and tropical islands, the sticker read: “Do You Want to Sail the World With Me?”
“It was an advert recruiting sailing crew,” explains Mark. “I’d seen it on a lamp-post in Thailand and liked the look of it. But for Nadiyana it was fate.”
Five years later, Nadiyana and Mark are permanent “liveaboards” dwelling at sea in a “formerly rotting” 34ft 1975 catamaran, which they restored with the help of online tutorials, and supporting a frugal lifestyle through Wildlings Sailing, a YouTube channel (60,000 subscribers) that details their brushes with inhospitable seas, engine failure and bemused nudist bathers.
“We live on around £5 a day,” says Nadiyana. “It is part of our philosophy that the liveaboard lifestyle can be for anyone, not just the super-rich.”
Sea-dwellers, or liveaboard cruisers (to distinguish the lifestyle from those who live on boats permanently moored in marinas) have increased in number in the past few years, as digital work cultures bring a lifestyle once for the well-to-do within the grasp of the average working-age adult. The pandemic, which has prompted both fantasies of escape and a re-evaluation of the lives we lived in 2019, has amplified these trends, with sales of bigger boats up 18% in 2020 (compared to 2019, the last figures available), according to industry body British Marine; and SE Yachts, which sells 34-46ft vessels into the UK market, has seen a 50% rise in sales in 2021.
Tim Geisler runs Nautilus Sailing, an intensive sailing school for would-be liveaboards, with his wife, Rosanna, in Colorado. “Our enquiries are up 100% on pre-pandemic levels,” he says. “Our clients have seen the liveaboard lifestyle on YouTube channels, many of these channels have millions of viewers, and they’ve thought, ‘You know what: I could live like that!’” Client demographics, Geisler notes, have also changed. “A few years ago it was seniors, but now 70% of our clients are aged between 35 and 55.”
Melissa Bennington, 35, husband Andy Turner, 48, and son Jack, nine, are planning to live aboard permanently from this autumn in a 40ft 1980s steel sailing yacht. The family are eco-retrofitting it (converting a diesel motor to run on electric lithium batteries) at Holyhead, north Wales. “Liveabording is 90% humdrum, 5% terror and 5% the most beautiful experience we’ve ever had,” says Melissa.
Andy, a paramedic, has been a hobbyist sailor for 20 years and has long fantasised about living aboard full-time. When he met Melissa, a travel booking agent, in 2018, they bonded over their shared dream of a globe-trotting adventure. “It was a red pill moment,” Andy says.
The Turner-Benningtons are planning to navigate the French canal system, then continue, via the coast of Portugal and north Africa, west across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. The route will land them in the kind climate of the Caribbean for winter, a popular destination for European liveaboard cruisers.
Melissa will homeschool Jack, as they travel, and the family are busy building remote networks of fellow home schooling liveaboards. “There’s a huge community of families from Britain who have ended up in the Caribbean due to Brexit, so we plan to meet for beach lessons,” she says. A new rule only allows Britons to be in Schengen Zone waters for 90 days in 180.
Ian Poole, 57, and partner Natalie Bannister, 44, met in Mallorca in 2018, where Natalie was working as a yacht-keeper. Both seasoned sailors, they performed the sailing stunt for the Bond movie No Time To Die. They have been liveaboards since 2019, in a “high maintenance” teak-panelled 1970s yacht that Ian restored in the 2000s, between his stints at sea with the Merchant Navy. Today the couple run YouTube channel S/V Blown Away, where their decades of sailing experience and down-to-earth accounts of the less glamorous aspects of liveaboard cruising make them firm favourites with aspiring sailors.
“We remind people that lives back in Britain are pretty cushioned,” says Melissa – God help you if you aspire to cook anything elaborate in a swaying galley kitchen, they point out. And shopping for basic provisions as a liveboard is a “full-day event”. “You have to get in your dinghy, get to shore and then get to the supermarket, which is usually on the far side of town,” Natalie explains. “As well as your shopping you might need to haul a 20-litre jerry can of fuel for the dingy in your rucksack.” Ian adds: “Then the waves might be so high they wash your loaves or whatever out of the dingy anyway.”
The couple are currently in Greece, “a seagoing nation” they adore for its free mooring and the warm welcome extended to liveaboards. They dropped anchor on the small island of Meganisi when Covid struck where, Ian says, “they treated us like family”, but plan to cruise on towards Turkey. “Loads of liveaboards want to lap the world in five years or whatever,” Natalie says. “But we like to get to know new places rather than mindlessly circumnavigating the globe.”
Liz Earle, 34 and from Nuneaton, became a crew member on Sailing SV Delos in 2017 after “drunk messaging” the American YouTubers. Within 24 hours, Earle had joined the Delos crew. She sailed across the south Atlantic on the 53ft yacht, going on to buy her own vessel in 2018, and travelling around the Caribbean with her then partner and later as a solo sea-dwelling liveaboard.
“People watch YouTubers and think sailing life is all about drinking rum and coconut water on deck,” she says. “But there are downsides: the exploding toilets, the rats and the cockroaches; the salt on absolutely everything.” For solo women sea-dwellers, she adds, there’s another notable pest. “I’ve lost count of the number of men who try to mansplain what to do with my lines [the ropes used to moor a vessel],” she says.
Liz is also dismayed by what she sees as a retrograde division of labour among heterosexual liveaboard couples, with women typically taking on the galley and men the boat work. “There seems to be this narrative that women aren’t capable, though you would think boat communities would be a bit more progressive.”
For Liz, who works as a self-employed illustrator and is contemplating painting her current home, a canal boat called the Leviathan, pale pink “like a giant penis”, the liveaboard lifestyle is about “not being beholden to any man,” whether that’s the man, or partner on whom she’s financially dependent. “With this life you’re not trapped with a mortgage and home can be somewhere new tomorrow,” she explains.
Helen and Jamie Lockhart, 38 and 54, used to run a fish and chip shop near Portsmouth, but have spent the past two and a half years living aboard their 1988 Bavaria 42ft yacht with their sons Louis, 16, and Max, 12. The family has sailed 2,000 nautical miles along the Portuguese and Spanish coasts and plan to cross the Atlantic later this year.
“Running a chip shop for 15 years, you spend many hours looking out the same 8ft by 8ft window,” Jamie says. “After a while life got a bit mundane. I wanted the kids to see more, too.” The family sold the business and signed up for a charter holiday on a yacht where they met a British family who were circumnavigating the world in a catamaran. “They gave us loads of advice and said, ‘Just go for it,’” Helen recalls.
The interconnectedness of the global liveaboard community has been a surprise to the Lockhearts. “There’s a site called No Fly Land where you can enter your boat details and who’s onboard and track and connect with other boats,” Helen says. “We use that a lot.”
This has been a big boon to her kids, especially Louis, who’s missing out on coming of age with contemporaries around. “Finding friends when you’re living onboard is the biggest challenge,” Louis says, adding that a “decent data package” keeps him and his brother Max in touch with friends across the world.
It’s a life, Helen admits, that can be harsh, and the claustrophobia of living in constrained space with a growing family, or a partner, can be a shock to the system. “It brings you back to the basics of material survival,” she says. “And, no exaggeration, something breaks every single day: whether it’s the fuel shut off, the pump or something silly like a tap washer.”
Ian and Natalie refer to the ranks of abandoned yachts in the depths of boatyards as the “graveyards of dreams”. “I’ve seen it over and over again where people run out of money or they get scared and have to give up the lifestyle,” Ian says of the prospects for the thousands of novice liveaboards inspired by the pandemic. However, there’s very little that would call the couple back to a landlubbing life – even Ian’s two infant grandchildren, who he hopes will one day enjoy visiting their seafaring grandpa. “We have no debts, no pressure, no schedules and I can’t recall the last time I wore anything other than shorts and T-shirts,” Ian says.
The Lockharts are also at sea, they tell me, for the foreseeable future, although Louis’ university plans could be a crunch point. “We’ve only got one life, haven’t we?” Helen says. “Who wants to spend that life in an office working for someone else – or, for that matter, frying chips?”
Nadiyana has achieved her childhood dream of becoming that Caribbean sailor girl. In 2021, she and Mark found themselves bobbing at anchor on the Mediterranean bathed in moonshine. “One moment it’s life or death and the next you’re watching this landscape that’s so beautiful you could cry,” she says. “It feels like a really concentrated life, somehow. Like we’re truly alive.”
