I work a full time, Monday to Friday, 7am to 4pm job, while also cruising full time. To my commuting, cubicle-bound coworkers, my turtle filled Instagram feed seems like an unattainable dream. To my retired cruising cohort, my computer staring days and rigid schedule sounds like an unrelenting nightmare.
So, how do I live the dream and keep the the work-life balance in check? At it’s core, focus, planning and acceptance are key to how I make the combination of working and live aboard sailing fit.
Working from a boat is all about keeping focus
If I were independently wealthy, I would work less and choose a more flexible schedule. But, at this stage in life, I can’t afford to retire, and after getting a taste of the cruising lifestyle during our sabbatical, I can’t face land life again. Working and cruising at the same time has its challenges, but I need to work and I choose to cruise.
Moving the boat frequently according to the perceived cruiser’s schedule can feel like a rat race with a chance of drowning when paired with the demands of work and life. While the tedium, chores, and irritation of “Real” life continues no matter where you live, for me boat life feels like living in technicolor while land life is shades of gray. The indescribable wonder of living on a boat means even repairing a sail at anchor can be joyful – it’s all just part of the adventure.
The key to managing expectations is keeping expectations manageable. Our overall focus is on staying afloat financially and being floating. This focus takes away the pressure to travel like a full-time cruiser; if we spend a winter in North Carolina instead of the Bahamas, we are still floating, so it’s all good.
The details to my working life
Working from a boat has been revolutionized in the last few years. First, the pandemic forced employers to see remote work as an option; my employer only started to hire remote workers as a response to the pandemic shake-up. Second, the introduction of Starlink satellite internet has made getting reliable, fast internet as we travel much easier. Finally, in the US, services like InstaCart, Uber, and Wal-Mart delivery saves time and effort, giving me back time in my day to focus on work.
My office is our saloon table. Putting my computer monitors on beefy arms means they don’t slip and slide while heeling, take up minimal space, and turn into the TV after work. After all, my workspace is also a dining and living room!
There’s no privacy! Matt somehow has to tune out my endless conversations as I do one to seven hours of videoconferencing a day. Because I take over the whole salon table, he is relegated to the uncomfortable chart table or hunching on the settee.
The reality is it’s not the most luxurious office space, but it beats a cubicle, and Chelsea the boat dog is always around to keep watch on deck and provide dolphin alerts.
Passage planning for the cruising office worker
We plan our cruises differently now that I work a full-time job. During our initial sabbatical, we sometimes moved the boat every day. It took us most of our first year to learn to slow down and enjoy each spot. To manage working while cruising, we’ve taken this to the next level.
Now, we get somewhere for the season and explore that area for a few months. We try to move the boat once a week (mostly on the weekends!) and find protected harbors so we don’t have to worry about changing weather during work hours. It means we visit fewer big destinations, but we get to explore each more intimately. On the weekends, we can move to a different anchorage or just enjoy the weekend in one spot.
Our favorite destinations are places where we can stay the whole season but still get in lots of excursions. We love the Abacos (Bahamas) and Penobscot Bay (Maine). In these spots, we stay for two or three months but keep moving around. We can find a harbor mooring or a cozy anchorage for a week or more. Then, we really get to know each spot.
All of this also means that we won’t be doing any long passages; crossing the Atlantic or going to the Caribbean won’t be in our immediate future. Instead, we keep our cruising grounds manageable with my work schedule, and only do one to three night passages. And we’ve learned to be as flexible as possible with them.
For example, we had planned to stay in the Abacos an extra month this season, but a great weekend weather window opened up. If we didn’t have jobs, we could have loitered a little longer and meandered back to the Chesapeake as the weather allowed. But the weather seldom aligns so well with my schedule, so we jumped at the chance to knock out nearly 500 miles in three nights.
Getting off the boat is a priority to make sure we are living the lifestyle instead of staring at a computer in a cave. Chelsea reminds me at exactly 4 P.M. every day that it’s time to find a frisbee field or beach. We row our dinghy for exercise, transport, and for the fun of it. We go on long walks and love fully exploring each location. We treat one day each weekend as a mini-vacation.
On occasion we also take a long weekend or a weeks vacation time to truly explore a cruising spot and have a real vacation. Over the winter, we took a long weekend and explored Abaco National Park, paddleboarding with turtles and enjoying the break. Last summer, we took a week off to explore Acadia National Park in Maine, walking, watching seals and porpoises, and hosting family.
Parting thoughts on working from my sailing home
One of the hardest things to accept is my own humanity. In my mind, I can somehow cruise hundreds of miles, work full time, get all the chores done, and love every minute! The reality is that I have limits and I can’t do it all. I can’t work while sailing, and all the planning and logistics of traveling take time, too.
Working while cruising, like anything in life, is what you make of it. I have to tamp down my FOMO as retired cruisers cross oceans and sabbatical takers visit beach bars while I’m at work. But then it’s Friday afternoon, and instead of driving back to a suburb I’m wading up to a floating bar for a pina colada. It’s a dream.
Do you work from your boat or is it something you’re considering in future? Share your experiences and advice for others down in the comments!
By Lucy Wilcox
Lucy sails on her Cabo Rico 38 with her husband Matt and boat dog Chelsea. After taking a two-year sailing sabbatical, she couldn’t face ditching sandy feet, dinghy rides, and boat life for dress shoes, traffic jams, and land life. She started by taking gig teaching jobs while earning certifications to become an instructional designer. She now works full-time building online courses for a major university. She cruises the US East Coast and Bahamas.
We know this all too well, and you captured it perfectly – especially the FOMO.
We definitely cruise so differently from most of our friends, but when we close our laptops at the end of the day, we’re still in Maine or the Bahamas or wherever in between, and we’re getting to enjoy so many amazing experiences we’d miss entirely otherwise.
Sometimes the life logistics are tough – getting packages, finding time for maintenance or laundry or whatnot, and sometimes I have to remind myself it’s ok to slow down. We spent a month in St. Augustine last year after realizing we were pushing to keep to an artificial schedule. We got to the Bahamas two weeks “late” because of it, but it meant we had more comfortable passages and were able to do some boat work that needed to be addressed before we went.
My experience of working full time while cruising was very different from the author’s, though I think the author was more describing living aboard and working rather than cruising. We had been living aboard full time for several months and began cruising internationally shortly after that. I had a contract job that had another 4 months to go at the time we left our home port to begin our cruising. My greatest feeling during those first 4 months was being disconnected from the places we were exploring and the people, locals and other cruisers, that we met. And from my wife, who wasn’t working and gaining experiences that I wasn’t fully sharing. It wasn’t until I stopped working that I realised that the two lives – working remotely and cruising – are not compatible, at least for me. Live aboard and working while moving the boat on weekends, sure, but not exploratory cruising. YMMV
Hello! I work part-time and I struggle with consistency
I feel guilty so I usually out boat chores, etc first. That causes me to feel a bit anxious because if I don’t work I don’t get paid. My partner does computer work very early in the morning but my work is more efficient later in the day. I know I just have to put my foot down…on myself and set a schedule where I coordinate with partner so that he is aware of my concerns and wishes