Our Life at Sea

I’m sitting at a table on our back porch, 360 miles from the nearest land, drifting west, barely faster than we could walk. The “back porch.” That is what I call our cockpit, the stern of our home. It has a table and seats, and it is perfectly open to the sea. Our home is a sailboat named Blue Buddha.

Nearby, my wife is on watch, sitting at the helm. Every few minutes, she looks up at the horizon, checks the radar screen, and gets back to her Kindle. 

It is day 5 of a 10-day passage from Raiatea to Niue in the South Pacific. It is the day I write the first description of our life at sea.  

So, I’ll start with the most basic fact: We live on the move with everything we own. 

Our clothes, the stove, the dumbbells, and books. A dinghy with a small outboard motor that acts as our family car. A washing machine, a fridge, a freezer, a water maker. Enough food to feed us for a lifetime. Fake plants, small paintings collected in various ports, charts, and a ukulele that has not seen daylight since the days of the pandemic. All of it moves with us aboard our home, crossing oceans and continents for days and weeks with no pause, carried by the wind over large swells, against currents, and into foreign lands.

At sea, our lives exist within the confines of this boat. After the initial shock, after the cacophony of sounds fades into white noise and the rolls and shakes become part of our own motion, our lives move on. We cook and eat. We work, read, watch TV, play card games, and stare at the sunsets and stars. We change sails, make fresh water, run the engines, and plot our location on a paper chart. Day after day, week after week, we move with everything we own and live. 

That, at the most basic level, is our life at sea. 

• Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below. If you enjoy this story, click “like” to help more readers discover it.
• This story is part of Passage Life, a collection of brief reflections and descriptions of life in the open ocean.

About Me

I’m Nestor Lopez-Duran, writing under the pen name N.L. Duran. I am a former psychology professor now sailing around the world while writing fiction and reflections on life at sea.