Many cruisers start part-timing when commitments to career and family tie them to a home base. It’s either squeeze in cruising in drips and drabs or not go at all. “Part timing was our way of cruising for our first twenty-three years,” say Bev of Cloverleaf. “We had five children, so cruising was limited to school vacations, sometimes with slight extensions on our part, when we preceded the kids and stayed on after they went home. This all required good help at home and in Dave’s business, as well as good communication capabilities.” Knowing they could be reached in an emergency allowed Bev to “extend the leash,” and when time ran out, they left the boat wherever they were and then resumed their cruise at the next opportunity.

These days – thanks to email, sat phones, and in some places Internet and Skype via WiFi or cellular broadband – onboard communications has advanced sufficiently to let would-be cruisers lengthen that leash even further, particularly from work. After all, in an era when so many people are working from home, why shouldn’t home be a boat?

“Do the math, though, in terms of how much you must use the boat to justify the expense,” advises Bev. “We figured we had to use the boat three months minimum or it was cheaper to charter. With chartering, you don’t waste time prepping to go or putting the boat away, both of which are a lot a of work, and, although there are restrictions on where you can sail and maybe not so homey a boat, you do get to jump around to different cruising grounds.”

Of course, many people come to part-timing at the other end of their cruising career. Suzanne and John of Zeelander found that after their circumnavigation, they were ready for ‘home comforts’ but unwilling to totally give up the cruising lifestyle. “So, we turned ourselves into ‘snowbirds’, cruising the Caribbean seven months, then enjoying all the modern conveniences, culture and family visits of shore life during the five months of hurricane season. It works out beautifully. Just when the constant boat chores, stuff breaking yet again and small spaces threaten to close in on us, in mid-May we fly home using frequent flyer miles earned by buying all that expensive boat stuff and eating local dinners out. In mid-October, when the air starts getting nippy and modern USA life starts to feel too frantic, we’re more than ready to fly back to warm climes and a simpler lifestyle.”

Some cruisers make part-timing part of their long-term cruising plan. “One reason I love cruising,” says Kathy of Hale Kai, “is the flexibility and variety it gives my life, and for me that includes taking time off the boat each year.” Kathy uses her time off for inland travel – such as hiking the Inca Trail and back-packing South America, or visiting places she’s not likely to sail herself – like the canals of France, trips often made in the company of cruising friends! She also takes time off be with family when they need her. “People worry that cruising away will make them unavailable to their families, but I’ve found it to be the opposite. As a cruiser, I am actually more able to drop what I’m doing and respond to a protracted call home than most people would be.”

Like many cruisers, Don and I started part-timing when we took a season off to be on hand for our grandson’s birth, something we’d promised Don’s daughter before we left. She and I did have a heart-to-heart before we headed across the Pacific about when a “convenient window of opportunity” might be! I can’t tell you how many cruisers in the Pacific we’ve encountered who’ve had to fly back to the US for weddings and births smack in the middle of the short cruising season. How inconsiderate! It may be unrealistic to expect landlubbers ever to accommodate us, but it certainly won’t happen if we don’t educate them.

Of course, many cruisers part time, because they must work to replenish the cruising kitty. Jane of Lionheart, for example, and her husband, after two seasons out from New Zealand, have slipped the boat in Mooloolaba and taken full-time jobs they hope will fund their round-the-world ambitions. Robin of Whisper and her husband – fortunate to have skills that eased them through visa obstacles – worked three years in New Zealand, for both the income and the experience of working overseas.

When you come “home” to work or visit regularly, as we chose to do with our growing grandson, there are a variety of complications that you encounter. Not only must you find a secure and affordable place to leave the boat for an extended time, but on the home end, it’s hard to avoid acquiring a place to live, a car, phones, etc. and the recurring payments that come with them. This virtually doubles your living expenses. If you don’t have your own shore base and stay with family and friends, you’re limited to what stuff you can schlep around in a suitcase and sleeping in strange beds.

Part-timing also adds complications to your strategic planning. “Now that we have a house,” says Mary of I Wanda, “we plan our cruises based on when we DON’T want to be at it.” For cruisers with homes in America’s south, that means cruising elsewhere during hurricane season, while for those from the north, it usually means getting out of winter’s cold. Full-time cruisers have to plan around seasons, too, of course, just without as much of the storage, insurance and travel costs and without, as Kathy of Sangaris notes, “the significant time and effort each commissioning and decommissioning cycle takes.”

Part-timing can also leave you feeling “less connected to the cruising community,” as Debbie of Illusions notes, when full-time friends move on without you. SSCA (Seven Seas Cruising Association) dubs members who live ashore part-time “Rear Commodores”, which is surely meant to be respectful to retiring cruisers, but somehow rubs the wrong way. As Mary of Camryka, whose husband is approaching 80, says of part-timing at their new house in Bocas del Toro, “The transition is difficult, maybe because it makes us know the years are adding up far too fast.” Staying within a cruising ground they know and love, Mary and Carl alternate between the house and boat in shorter stints.

Practically speaking, the best cruising destinations for part-timers are ones that afford realistic travel home – Maine, the Bahamas or the Caribbean for East Coast sailors and the Pacific Northwest and Mexico for West Coast sailors. Although some do it, the South Pacific is not a great choice because of the distances involved, the paucity of storage options, customs limitations, and the fact that off-seasons in New Zealand or the Marshalls offer attractive cruising in their own right. On the other hand, after several seasons each, both Mary of I Wanda and Katherine of Sangaris would recommend the Med as made-to-order for part-timing. “You simply haul out your boat at the end of the season, return to the US, and in doing so avoid the annoying alternative of spending a significant part of the year wintering at dock on a sailboat in the cold.”

Contributing Admirals: ; Beverly Feiges, Cloverleaf, Kathy Parsons, Hale Kai; Debbie Leisure, Illusions; Sheri Schneider, Procyon; Mary Heckrotte, Camryka; Mary Verlaque, I Wanda; Jane Kilburn, Lionheart; Robin Owen, Whisper; Katherine Briggs, Sangaris.

This article was published in the September 2009 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

Related articles (on this website)

• Home for the Holidays (Admiral’s Angle column #16)
• Keeping a Home Back Home (Admiral’s Angle column #13)

The decision you make will depend on many things, but chief among them are going to be your financial situation and the planned duration of your cruise. If you are planning a finite trip — say a season to Mexico or a year-and-a-half jaunt around the Caribbean, selling out makes less sense, unless you are just hankering for a fresh start. If the planned cruise is longer or even open-ended, it will come down to practical and financial realities. Many people simply don’t have the choice; there is only enough money for one or the other, the house or the boat. Jean and her husband Tom of the CSY 44 Jean Marie, for example, are currently prepping for their second circumnavigation, and Jean says, “Neither time have we chosen to keep a home. We don’t have the money to maintain both and we have never wanted the hassle of having to deal with a rental property from afar, the only way we could have afforded it.”

Without doubt it is easier to let go and immerse yourself in the cruising life when there are no strings attaching you back home. Strings have a way of getting tangled, and trying to untangle them long distance can be a challenge. But when you come from an area where real estate values are going wild –California’s Bay Area, for example – the hassles of renting out your home may be worth it. Lisa of Lady Galadriel says, “It was never a question for us. With the cost of housing escalating as it is, if we ever wanted to go back, there’s no way we could afford it.” Like many cruisers wanting to maintain a toehold in their home turf, they have rented out their house while keeping a room and storage area for themselves. But, houses need maintenance and rentals need management, and holding on to real estate will often require long distance communication and expensive and inconveniently-timed trips back home. “You have to budget for repairs, insurance, taxes, etc on top of your cruising expenses,” Lisa adds, “and renters will never care for your home the way you did. By the time you get back, your home may not seem like home any more.”

But even when selling out is the logical thing to do, must you do it all up front? What if you don’t like cruising? Hard to imagine, but it does happen. I remember meeting a family four months out on their first cruise. They’d sold everything – home AND business – ready to embrace cruising fully. Only it wasn’t working. The passage down had so unnerved them all that they simply couldn’t keep going. What a bleak prospect, knowing all your bridges are burned behind you! Yet, other cruisers I’ve known have tried to hold on too long from afar, only to find the house or business has run downhill in other hands, and they have to quit cruising to go back and salvage things.

What can be hard to realize up front when you are shrewdly hedging your bets is that the cruising life is addictive. It’s not long before the boat is truly home, and everything else is “back there.” Plans expand and years go by, and what you expect from life has been changed by the world you have seen. So when the time comes to wind down and bury the anchor, many cruisers opt to settle far from where they started. We have cruising friends settling in Panama, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii.

This brings up a point about STUFF. “Before we left on our voyage,” says Vicki of Firebird, “we put a lot of stuff in a locker in Florida, but here we are in Hawaii! I’ve been paying the rent on the locker for years, but now what am I going to do with it?”

When cruisers do go “back,” family is often the catalyst. It seems a general rule that cruisers with kids aboard find their way back to land about the time the oldest needs to start high school. Sometimes, cruising families continue the adventure by living aboard in a marina in a new area, but others swap the boat for a house, and those who kept their original home just pick up where they left off.

For older cruisers the family draw “home” is often aging parents or new grandchildren, but in this day and age, the mobility of families often means that neither the folks nor the kids are where you left them. Kathy B of Sunflower, who sold their home in Kansas to circumnavigate, tells how her daughter has since moved to Michigan. “When we return from cruising, we want to be near them, so it’s just as well we sold when we did.”

It’s an irony, I think, that after years of living like a turtle, carrying our homes with us, one of the hardest parts about suddenly needing to be back ashore part-time is not having a consistent place to lay our heads. Motels and guest rooms get old quickly! For this reason, many cruisers like Kathy of Sangaris have taken the condo option. “After years of schlepping duffels to family and friends’ houses during visits to the US from Europe, we eventually bought a condo where we could empty out our storage locker, keep an eye on our auntie in assisted living, and just have a place to land. We decided after all a few strings might not be too bad.”

Some couples buy the condo in the original decision to downsize before cruising, hoping that the investment will pay off over time. Others wait a bit to see where they might want to roost. And others, after years as vagabonds, can’t commit. My husband Don and I fall into this category, and our solution for the months we spend Stateside as grandparents, is an RV. I call it “a boat in a box,” or the “rolling suitcase.” The lifestyle is similar to cruising, and there’s enough storage on board to leave behind our stateside clothes. It has all the other comforts of home, yet we need not be fixed in one place. Then, when we return to the boat, we park it, close it up, and forget it. Unfortunately, unlike a condo, a motorhome is a depreciating investment!

Whatever you decide, pulling up roots is never easy, nor, quite frankly, will be putting them down again when the time comes to dock for the last time. But the reward of the broadened horizons of cruising is well worth the gamble for most of us. Even though we are not fixed in one place, we add up to a huge community, with “air-roots” (so to speak) the world around. You’ll know you are a real cruiser when someone asks, “Where are you from?” …and you find it hard to answer.

Contributing Admirals: Jean Service, Jean Marie; Lisa Schofield, Lady Galadriel; Ellen Sanpere, Cayenne III; Vicki Juvrud, Firebird; Mary Heckrotte, Camryka; Kathy Blanding, Sunflower; Katherine Briggs, Sangaris; Iretta Micskey, Rigó; Kathy Parsons, Hale Kai; plus others. (And thanks very much to my webmaster, Sherry McCampbell on Soggy Paws)

This article was published in the August 2007 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

“For me,” observes Kathy Parsons of Hale Kai, a Downeast 38 cutter, “IT is feeling that my boat is truly home and that my community is a fluid one that consists of all the people that cruising has allowed me to meet – both other cruisers and people I’ve met in the countries I’ve visited.” “Friendships — with folks who so often are kindred spirits — are made quickly and solidified by shared adversity and fun,” says Mary Verlaque of I Wanda. “Nobody asks what you did in your ‘other life’, and it is simply unimportant. You are accepted (usually) by your acts and your seamanship.” And when you part ways, Folksinger Eileen Quinn reminds, “You learn to trust that the winds will cause your paths to cross again.”

Making the boat you cruise on into YOUR home is a common observation. As Mary Heckrotte of Camryka, a Westerly 36, succinctly observes, IT is the comfort of “cooking in my same old pots, sleeping in my same old bed, then looking out my porthole to see a whole different country.” Boat as home may come most naturally when a couple buys a boat together, but “too often,” writes Debbie Leisure from her 29’ Island Packet Illusions, “women move on board a boat that is HIS boat. They have little say in anything except the galley. For a woman to make that boat her home, she must become emotionally attached to it, as she probably was to her home on land.” Lisa Schofield of Lady Galadriel, who has now traveled from San Francisco to the Chesapeake on what was originally her husband’s Crealock 37, seconds that. “In my observations of other cruisers, it’s been clear that those who don’t have IT aren’t happy aboard, and many times that has to do simply with not having brought along things that give them pleasure.”

Beyond building a physical connection to the boat, the Admirals say, getting into IT extends to being party to all the decision-making of the cruise. In a crew of two, especially when husband and wife, there is no place for Bligh-like tyranny by “The Captain”, but equally there is no room for a passive passenger. It is in the best interest of life aboard that each person develops expertise in particular areas, yet each should have a working understanding of the other’s, as well On Tackless II, we have “board meetings” – usually over morning coffee or after the lights are out on the dinner dishes – during which we each report on our own “departments”, and seek the other’s input. We always consider together any upcoming plans and projects, destinations, and weather forecasts until we come to a common decision. This way we share in the responsibility.

The object of all this is achieving a self-determined lifestyle. “In cruising,” says Kathy Parsons, “you move so far outside the box of expectations, that the weight of “shoulds” largely disappears and you live your life the way you want.

”From what my Admirals say, women seeking IT will do well to cultivate in themselves such personality traits as flexibility and adaptability, an independent nature, a satisfaction at living hand-in-hand with nature, a capacity to make do with somewhat less than most of what passes for necessary in our consumption-crazy world, and a willingness to step up to the unknown. My friend Kathy Blanding of Sunflower carries the following saying in her billfold. “Live in wonder; be willing not to know.” I don’t know where that comes from, but it seems fundamental to the life of travel that cruising is. “And if you don’t travel with the boat,” points out Eileen Quinn “then it’s just living aboard!” However, she wisely adds that IT doesn’t come all at once. “The first year or two, cruising is mostly about getting to know your boat, yourself and your partner underway. There’s little spare time; every experience is new and the learning curve is steep. I promised my husband that I wouldn’t pass judgment on the lifestyle until we’d been at it a good six months.” It must have worked. Eileen and her husband have been cruising together aboard Little Giddings, a Bayfield 36, for twelve years.

This article was published in the September 2006 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.