The waves lapping against the hull as the sailboat gently sways from side to side, the light wind causing the halyards to clang against the mast with an audible “trrriiiinnng, trrriiinnnng”, and the cool salt air cuts the heat of a warm summer night. As the quiet surrounds you, the faint crunching of sea life eating the growth under the boat echoes through the cabin.

It could be the opening to a great adventure/romance novel; in this case it’s how I grew up. 

Moving onto the boat was easy; I was 5 with two siblings and my parents, and the idea and opportunity were conveniently presented to our family. 

When we first moved onto my fathers’ 32’ weekend project boat, my parents feared we would not like living on the boat. This potential problem was put to ease during family ‘powwows’ in which they would check in with us after a day, a week, a month, then at one year we would look for a bigger boat. If we decided we didn’t want to live onboard, we would look on land. It took us a while to find the perfect family boat. After four years, and the promise of pets later, we were living nicely on a 42’ Irwin with 2 cats, a dog, and a fish named “Skippy” after the peanut butter jar we kept him in. 

The live-aboard lifestyle suited us. 

My brother, would don an eye-patch and his plastic sword, running the length of the dock to proclaim himself a pirate, my sister would race optimist sailing dinghy’s (tied for first in the junior Olympics one year), and I would sit on the bowsprit and write. We were homeschooled, which gave our family flexibility in traveling, but were granted many opportunities because of it. The first argument about homeschooling I hear is about being ‘anti-social’ and unable to relate to people. While I have met the occasional person who fits this stereotype, it is just that, a stereotype. We were always moving, I don’t believe that we ever stayed in one place for more than two years, and having this mobility allowed us to meet many people, not just a couple. We learned how to be friends with adults, and communicate on an adult level at a young age. We would have family nights, watching movies our 14” television, since we didn’t have cable. We would communicate by email, and my father had a pager for work until I was 9, when we got the first family cell phone. (Remember the time when cellphones didn’t have any graphics? They were just for calling, and if you were lucky, texting.) Our family became very close. The whole boat was the size of some living rooms and we had to learn to get along. Some of my land friends hardly saw their family together in the same day. 

As we would travel, we would meet other kids our age, also homeschooled and living on the boat, and we became our own community. We would switch off meeting at each others boat to do our homework; if we were the same grade we would help each other, and when a problem was too hard, we would ask one of the older siblings for help. We would meet people from Germany who would help us learn a little German, or from Quebec that would teach us a little French. When we arrived in the Bahamas, my mother distributed homework according to our age. My older sister interviewed a customs officer and had to write a research paper about the policies of the Bahamas, I wrote a shorter paper on the culture, and my younger brother had to do a project on the geography. We were always incorporating the location we were currently at into our studies. Taking field trips to the power plant, orange juice plant, or a tour of the St. Augustine fort would become homework assignments. Every year the Florida Homeschoolers Association would host a convention where curriculum vendors would sell textbooks and work books, lectures on teaching would be given to parents, and a graduation ceremony was given to the students who had completed their high school while homeschooling. This growing community was not just boaters, though the years that we attended this, we would be with our cruising buddies.