11 minute read
Easter Island to Cape Horn and South Georgia, Falklands to Norway and More: A Family’s Three-Year, 36,000-Nautical Mile Adventure
by Porter Barnes and Molly Barnes, Boston Station
MOLLY: In 2013, my husband, Christopher, and I sold our house, our cars, and nearly half of our belongings in Leadville, Colorado, and moved onto Sila to embark on a family adventure. We had been taking other people’s children on adventures in the mountains and canyons of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah for 20 years; it was time to take our two sons, Rabbit and Porter, then nine and ten years old, on one.
We started in Tréguier, France, where we took ownership of Sila, a 47-foot Boreal: an aluminum hull, rigged with simple systems such as at-themast reefing, large water tanks but no watermaker, an icebox instead of refrigeration, and no genset. With simplicity in mind, we set sail, learning as we went and building on a decade of summertime cruising experience. After four months in France, Spain, and Portugal, we left the Cape Verde islands to sail across the Atlantic to Antigua, then enjoyed the Caribbean until the year ended. The following year took us to far-reaching places including the Galapagos, Easter Island, Cape Horn, Ascension, the Azores, Ireland, and our favorite, South Georgia, off Antarctica. We spent months at sea crossing big expanses of ocean, and as many months poking our way through stunning coasts and islands. Finally, we crossed the Arctic Circle in Norway, cruised south slowly and crossed the pond one more time via the Caribbean and into New York Harbor, ending exactly three years after we started with a haulout in Maine.
PORTER: I always get the same few questions about our adventure on the boat. Invariably, there is one about storms and sharks. We answer by talking about our weather forecasting system to avoid storms, and explaining that sharks really weren’t an issue. I like to follow with my favorite harmless shark stories. A few questions down the line, maybe after the “favorite place” question, people usually ask how we tolerated living together in such a small space. Tolerated? Hmmm. I frequently ignore this and simply say that I got along with my brother and add something about getting to know my parents really well, but the question has always kind of bothered me. I recently realized that I did not simply tolerate these people; we became a real family on the boat. That is fundamentally what made our expedition so special—our family relationships were enriched.
Almost every other night, we played Oh Hell, a tricktaking card game that is a precursor to bridge. Fun became a daily staple of family life, not just a pleasant surprise on some weekends. The brilliance of Oh Hell is not in the cards, but in the way it creates conversation. It’s just engaging enough that you can play and talk, sustained by the chocolate bar that more or less became necessary to the game, sometimes for as long as an hour.
Porter reefing, bound for the Azores
Molly and Porter in Port Stanley, Falkland Islands
Porter and Rabbit, coming into New York Harbor
Porter and Rabbit preparing for an evening card game
MOLLY: The regular games, whether it was Oh Hell, Catan, Survive, or Carcassonne, certainly brought us together most nights. But for the first time in the boys’ lives, we were also not both working full time. This meant my mind was not preoccupied with an unrelated to-do list. When I did mention something that needed doing (“I need to clean the big winches in the cockpit soon,” or “We need to eat the spinach before it goes bad”), it was relevant to all of us. Because we were all part of the same expedition, the same experience, we were each able to be fully present for the nightly game. Perhaps more importantly, the games had a leveling effect, as any one of the four of us could win on any given night. There was a moment each day when parent and child roles were subordinate to friendly competition, and someone would earn the bragging rights for victory until the next night.
We were very clear from the beginning that the entire family would be crew, not passengers, on Sila. When we first moved onto the boat, the boys washed the dinner dishes every single night, took turns cleaning the aft head, cooked dinner for the family one night a week, helped to complete and record the daily engine check, and learned to hand, reef, and steer. During our first offshore passage, they each stood watch with one of us for an hour at a time. The methodical learning curve meant that by the end of our three years, they each completely managed six hours of watch, mostly during the day. We both regularly slept during their watches.
PORTER: The phrase “crew not passengers” would haunt me over hundreds of dishes and many hours of watch. It was not fun, but in retrospect I loved the work. On the last of our three Atlantic crossings, my brother and I asked my dad to wake us, instead of our mom, as a surprise. The two of us each took a two-hour shift watching the sails from midnight to four in the morning, letting our mom catch up on sleep. It is a powerful feeling for a 12-year-old to stand on deck, the only one awake, tending the wind-steering gear to make sure that forces as strong as the trade winds, the sails, and the waves stayed in balance while the boat moved westward.
The Barnes family at Cape Horn, December 2014.
that I had overslept the midnight start of my watch, panicked that something had happened to Christopher, observed that the boat was clearly sailing well, knew that we had obviously not hit anything, and surmised that Christopher had fallen asleep on watch. Imagine my relief when I climbed out of the aft cabin and heard Rabbit, then 11 years old, announce that he and Porter had split my watch so I could sleep. When he pointed out that there were no boats in sight or on radar, that we were on course, that the sails were set perfectly, and that “The Wizard” (our Windpilot) was steering perfectly, I was overtaken with parental pride.
While this level of competency and trust was heartwarming, the real value had come in the journey to reach it. When we first began sailing, we did not trust the boys to manage their own harnesses. For example, when Porter wanted to come on deck, a parent had to clip his tether for him. Over time, we slowly began to trust, but verify: the boys operated their own tether clips but a parent had to confirm compliance.
Sila anchored in Cobbler’s Cove, South Georgia.
Ultimately, we had pre-teens demonstrating enough responsibility to manage their own tethers—and we were confident enough in their compliance and overall competence that we were readily able to fall asleep when one was on watch. This implicit trust at a young age absolutely deepened our relationship, in part because it freed up the mental energy and time to dig into more complex and interesting topics and to share lighthearted moments. Because they were taking more responsibility in sailing and managing themselves and the boat, they also earned more freedom and independence.
PORTER: As time passed, I felt the effects. I could see myself gaining responsibility and independence. This feeling didn’t just satisfy me, it changed the tone of family conversations. In an argument between a 13-year-old and his parents, there is a power difference, one against which the teen is probably pushing.
Exploring Seno Pia glacier by dinghy.
The tone of this argument changes, for the better in my opinion, if the two sides are brought closer to being equals by working together on the same thing. We each commit a quarter of our day to standing watch. The result is a two-way street. Going one way, I am unconsciously building goodwill with my parents. In the other direction, the work involved in cooking one meal a week and doing a share of the watch showed me the hard work involved in living on and maintaining a boat. The four of us were on the same page, working toward shared goals and enjoying shared experiences in a way that I had never seen in a family.
If fun and work were the mortar that held our foundation together, the bricks were time. There is nothing like seeing only three other people for months on end in the Chilean channels to make you appreciate each other’s contributions. We have countless shared experiences and memories of little moments. To this day, we laugh uproariously when we talk about the burning squirrel from a podcast that we listened to one afternoon on passage. I can tell countless stories about the many ways Rabbit and I jumped off the boat, including a Tarzan swing. And we all remember, as our mouths water at the thought, the moment when I caught two small tuna at the same time. The simple number of stories is of real importance.
Extended time on the boat requires food, especially with two teenage boys, so trips to grocery stores were a staple of our visits to land. Even when we were tied up at a dock, provisioning the boat for multiple months without the help of a car was a significant undertaking. In the spirit of crew not passengers, my mom and I would walk to the grocery store with big backpacks and canvas totes. I would stagger back with a 50-liter backpack full of canned food and dried beans (my name is Porter, after all). I like to joke that my mom usually carried the toilet paper and other light and airy things! No matter whether the loads were heavy or light, our shopping trips strengthened our bonds with each other, as we tried to read labels in foreign languages, dreamed about delicious meals with our new bounty, and schemed practical jokes to pull on Rabbit and Daddy.
Mahi mahi in the Bahamas
These hours spent wandering streets of small European, Chilean, mainland and island towns in search of grocery stores were a consistent highlight. While our relationship flourished in extraordinary places (beaches covered with 300,000 penguins, glaciers filling a bay with ice, or thousands of dolphins jumping as far as the eye could see), it was built in the mundane moments of shopping. Walking together is almost sacred to me now. When I was struggling to adjust after moving ashore, we would walk in the hills behind our new home and talk. I would find myself looking for a grocery store, which was more relaxing to me than the foreign landscape.
All this time together set the stage for some pretty special moments. During our first Atlantic crossing, I emerged from my sleep and blearily looked into the red headlamp. Following whispered directions, I slipped on a thin sweater, a pair of shorts, and my harness. I climbed up on deck, clipping my harness into the cockpit’s jacklines. As I stepped out into the open air, the breeze hit me. Sila was cruising along, with just a gentle roll as we flew downwind. My eyes cleared as I looked around. Stars stretched from horizon to horizon in every direction. Mama sat down next to me and handed me an earbud. With each of us wearing one earbud, we shared a song, OneRepublic’s Counting Stars. A glowing white sash hung across the sky, barely recognizable as the collection of stars I had known as the Milky Way. With no land in sight, and not a drop of light pollution, the stars extended down to the ocean on all sides. I felt surrounded, as if the night sky were reaching around, hugging me, hugging Sila. Then I felt the hug, warm and calming, but it wasn’t the sky’s, it was Mama’s.
MOLLY: When people ask us about living on a boat, we always answer that it was the best thing we ever did. We sailed to some extraordinary places and we saw some truly awe-inspiring sights. We met fascinating, smart, kind, generous people everywhere we went. We learned firsthand just how big and just how small the world is. By far and away, though, what made it the best is the simple fact that we did it together as a family. The expedition is over, but the bonds we created hold fast even as we move into new and more separated chapters of our lives.
About the Authors After founding and running the High Mountain Institute for 18 years, Molly and Christopher Barnes moved onto a sailboat with their two sons, Porter and Jack “Rabbit,” in 2013. Leaving their home in Leadville, Colorado, they flew to France to pick up their new Boreal 47. Christened Sila, she is an aluminum centerboard boat, built with the intent of adventuring in the high latitudes. The family set sail, eventually heading both far south and far north. After three years and 36,000 miles, Christopher took a job as the head of school at Midland, a boarding school in California. Living 30 miles inland, Molly and Porter, now a junior at Midland, wrote this article together, remembering the cruise that brought the Barnes family closer together. Sila is currently in Newfoundland, where Molly and Christopher will continue their northerly explorations during summer vacations.
