This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Elliot Schoenfeld and Jennifer Johnson, both 33, who lived on a boat for a year while traveling the Great American Loop. The two are now living in a van traveling the country. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Elliot: Six months prior to us buying our boat, I don’t think we would’ve said that we were going to live on a boat or buy a boat — it wasn’t in the cards. The reason why it was an option was because of COVID.
We were traveling full-time when COVID hit. We were in India and locked down for five months. We were planning to travel for a year, and we thought we’d figure out a way to travel longer and safer.
We were tossing up different ideas for when we got back to the States: Do we want to do an RV thing, or build out a van, or try sailing? We were honestly 50-50 on sailing, and we decided to just try the boating thing now and then try the van thing later.
Jen: I think that relationships have a yin and a yang to them. Elliot is more of the risky person, and I’m much more the risk-averse person.
So Elliot was like, “Let’s do a boat.” And I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. We don’t know how to boat. Let’s hold on here.”
We have to be responsible for this thing, we have to make sure we get from place to place, we have to take care of this engine, we have to make sure we don’t drown or sink — there’s so much to do.
Elliot: We wanted to stay somewhat inland and we wanted to see if we liked it. That’s how we narrowed down the boat we bought and the loop, because it was mostly protected waters, which allowed us to learn a lot about boating. We didn’t know anything other than one sailing course.
Did we have a lifelong ambition to live on a boat? Probably not. But doing it now, we know boating has got to be part of our long-term plans in life, because it changed us in a lot of different ways.
We learned almost everything on the fly
Jen: There’s that personal growth and that individual growth, but then there’s also the growth of trusting each other in a relationship, too.
At the beginning, Elliot didn’t know what he was doing, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I can’t put my trust in anyone because you don’t know what you’re doing either. We’re just Frick and Frack out here. So it was very nerve-racking.
But as Elliot grew to become much more of a seasoned and experienced captain, I was able to put my trust in him.
Not that I would say that I’m ready to go sail around the world, but by the end of it, I felt like I would be ready to take the next step and to maybe go to the Bahamas or the Caribbean.
Elliot: The first 90 days on the trip, it was like every single day there was something big that we learned.
Jen: It was drinking from a fire hose.
Elliot: With the loop, you get to experience almost every single thing, with respect to boating, besides a big ocean crossing. You get rivers, you do get ocean, you get locks, you get sand in Florida, you get rocks in Canada, you kind of get a taste of everything.
Jen: It just keeps you on your toes because you’re in so many of these environments for only a few months at a time before you’re into another environment, and then you’re like, OK, what am I learning now? It’s constant learning and learning and learning.
Elliot: We were not nautical people before this journey. I like to be in the water and swim, but my family never had a boat growing up or anything like that. So I don’t think there is any exclusion to doing it. But there are a lot of trade-offs, so you have to be OK with the trade-offs so you can live more frugally like we did.
You have anxiety with weather — that rules your life on a boat. In a house, you don’t worry about that storm that’s coming through. Unless it’s a big storm like a hurricane, you’re not that concerned. Your sewage system’s going to work, your lights are probably going to stay on.
In a boat, none of that is guaranteed. So some of your time is going to be spent planning for the weather, making sure you’re in a safe location.
Jen: Putting ourselves into the deep end and learning all of these new things, that was really fun. A lot of fun. It was hard, but it was definitely worth it.
For the most part, our life was cheaper on the boat than on land
Elliot: We moved every other day, on average, and it took 11 months.
Our boat moved about seven miles an hour, and if you do eight hours of boating, that’s almost 60 miles. So you have to always move. But slow traveling is part of the fun. I think at the end we had done over 10,000 miles.
In one year, we spent just over $40,000, which we thought was super reasonable. At first glance, you’re like, “It’s a 40-something-thousand-dollar vacation.” But those were our yearly expenses. Imagine living in an apartment or having a mortgage and car payments, and stuff like that. That’s extremely comparable. It’s probably extremely low when you think about it like that.
But, I’m of the mentality that everything costs something: it’s either time or money. So on a boat, you save the money, but you spend more time.
Jen: In van life, our grocery bill is a little bit cheaper because we’re able to go to Costco, and that was not really something that we did on the boat at all.
You’re limited in food — at least in our experience. We limited ourselves to the nearest grocery store while living on the boat, so that wasn’t always the most budget-friendly grocery stores. It was just the most convenient.
But the other side of the coin would be if you were to go to a more budget-friendly grocery store, you would either have to potentially get an Uber or a Lyft, or other people might’ve had bikes. But our grocery bill is slightly less now.
Elliot: If you like that and you don’t mind things in life taking longer, then I would definitely say it’s a great way to save money and live. That’s the only reason why we were able to do the trip at all is because it was cheaper. We didn’t come with a bunch of money saved up for this trip. We knew that we had to do it as budget as possible and then also live as budget as possible. And we were able to do that. And that’s only possible just because of the lifestyle.
Jen: In my opinion, if someone wants to have a break from their typical, traditional land life, it’s a great option. It does come with setbacks or challenges, like Elliot mentioned, but do we think it’s worth it? Yes.
Elliot: One month in the boat life, we were like, “Get us off this boat. It’s not for us. It’s not easy. Nothing’s working out.” Three months into boat life, “Let’s get off the boat. It’s too hard. We’re in over our heads.” But then, slowly after the time we’ve spent really trying to hone our crafts, we began to love it. And now we love it.
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