JUNE 15, 2025 – (Cont.) I’m now in the small state of Connecticut, which is a big state for boats—many of them, big boats. The state next door, Rhode Island, is an even smaller state but with a moniker writ large: The Ocean State. The rest of New England is outwardly seafaring too, except . . . Vermont, which is called the Green Mountain State (emphasis added), reflecting its elevated topography. But though Vermont has no oceanfront, it does occupy the eastern shore of Lake Champlain and the shoreline of the south end of Lake Memphrémagog (try saying that 10 times without injuring yourself). As an eyewitness, I can attest to the fact that serious sail- and power boats ply the broad waters of those two lakes. Between Lake Champlain and New York Harbor—and the world—the Hudson River is navigable by vessels large enough to circumnavigate the globe.
I spent a year in school in Vermont, and except for a couple of field trips to the aforementioned lakes, I was very much a “mountain person”—skiing and hiking on terra firma. Nearly every kid at the school was similarly geared to the mountains, but at least one of them, I discovered, was a serious sailor. After his freshman year, he and his father had sailed their family sailboat across the Atlantic—to France from their home state of . . . drum roll, drum roll . . . Connecticut. Little could have impressed me more. What?! A kid my age sailing the ocean blue on a sailboat with just two people aboard—he and his dad?! I was flabbergasted.
Since then, I’ve met many others who’ve logged endless nautical miles of offshore cruising and transoceanic passages, all on watercraft that would never be confused with a full-rigged ship, a freighter, a destroyer or a cruise ship. I’ve heard their stories of storms and equipment failures, fog and near collisions, hard blows and heavy seas, and even rescues at sea; if only 10% of their yarns were true, I’d count myself lucky not to have been aboard and therefore, not requiring lifelong therapy for PTSD.
I’ve read extensively about ancient mariners—the Polynesians who sailed their balsa wood rafts unimaginable distances across the South Pacific; the Phoenicians who sailed from one end of the Mediterranean to the other; the Vikings, who sailed their open-air, shallow-hull ships out over the horizon of the North Atlantic and over the edge of the world; the Chinese traders who in the 14th and 15th centuries sailed enormous trading vessels between east Asia and the Arabian Peninsula; the Iberians in pursuit of spices and gold and slaves in the “Age of Discovery”; the British explorers in search of trade routes and places to build, then connect an empire “on which the sun never set”; and other adventurers, such as the crew of Endurance, who, after meeting disastrous failure in Antarctica, struck out in a lifeboat barely bigger than a rowboat[1] to cross the Drake Passage; and our countrymen, who chased whales over the ocean blue and nearly to extinction.
I’ve also read Dove, the account of Robin Lee Graham’s improbable five-year solo voyage around the world between 1965, when he as just 16 years old, and 1970. A few years later I read Alone Against the Atlantic, the story about Gerry Spiess of White Bear Lake, Minnesota, who sailed his 10-foot homemade sailboat across the Atlantic in 1979 and across the Pacific Ocean in 1981.
All of these exploits test the imagination of anyone familiar with modern technologies, from self-steering rudder systems to desalinization equipment to navigational aids to weather apps to anodized fittings to the materials used for sails (carbon fiber, Kevlar, and Dyneema (ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene) to (dare I say it . . .) Starlink. How in the world did people sail the world without these technologies?
Now fast forward to the current line of solo sailors who on any given day are amidst trans-oceanic passages from one extremely remote pinpoint on the map to another as they circumnavigate the globe. Since I started following three of these mariners, I’m now receiving links to more sailors than I could possibly track. If I was dumbfounded by the exploits of Graham and Spiess, not to mention those of Zheng He, Erik the Red, Captains Cook, Drake and—sorry, I have to add . . . Columbus—I’m now unable to grasp how many people are out there sailing solo in the wakes of all the great mariners who preceded them.
The three seafarers I follow include “Drew,” a Canadian, who has years of solo experience sailing the world over; “Oliver,” a guy from Oregon who didn’t know a thing about sailing when he quit his job, liquidated his 401(k), bought a sailboat and learned how to sail it—first to Hawaii on the initial leg of his round-the-world trip; and “Cole,” a 31-year-old who was the first American woman to race solo non-stop around the world; an ever chipper person who could be the kid next door but conquers whole oceans of danger and uncertainty.
Almost as amazing as the exploits of “my sailors” are their video posts. In a previous era, a sophisticated camera crew with all sorts of clumsy and expensive gear would have been required to capture life aboard ship. Today, each of the sailors I follow deploys various cutting edge compact and versatile technologies to bring the viewer close enough to the action to feel the spray of seawater, see the sunrises and sunsets, taste the onboard cuisine. They’re smart, funny, articulate people, great at problem-solving, and however quirky, they’re remarkably even keeled.
I spend perhaps a half hour a day tracking the passages of these extraordinary people. With feet planted firmly on land (or butt affixed to a chair), I follow them closely. In the stormy political seas across our land, I find considerable reassurance in the detached and largely unheralded achievements of “my sailors.” Against the backdrop of a country—and therefore, a world—under such extraordinary stress, I find hope and faith in the resilience of our species.
Most critically, these sailors—and so many others in the same “fleet”—call their followers to a perspective that each of us needs to embrace and cultivate: we live on a planet like no other, and only we can save it from ourselves.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] The boat, named the James Caird, was a lifeboat from Endurance, the ill-fated ship of the Shackleton Expedition to Antarctica. Thirty years ago it was part of a special exhibition at the Natural History Museum in New York. In town on business at the time, I made a quick visit to the museum to behold the boat. I would never dream of voluntarily hopping on board for a voyage in heavy seas out of the sight of land, let alone 800 miles across the nastiest waters on earth.
