I’ve had a hard time getting this blog post started, frankly, I’m not excited to write it but it’s so rarely talked about that I need to put it out there. There is a high rate of sailor attrition, and so few people talk about why sailors quit that it seems unheard of. I wouldn’t call our sailing experience a failure by any measure, no one who sails 5000 miles does so if they truly can’t stand sailing, but we certainly downgraded our plans significantly because the bottom line, for us, is that we don’t enjoy the lifestyle. And it feels like no one is allowed to say that out loud. So let’s talk about why sailors quit!

Wait, Not Everyone Loves Sailing?

I first started thinking about writing about sailor attrition when I saw this Instagram post from Lin Pardey:

If success in cruising is finding satisfaction or enjoyment from what you’re doing, having a sense of harmony on board, feeling glad you had the experience, eager to continue or to go off again, I’d say that the success rate amount people who set sail for a defined limit cruise of six months to a year and a half is about 35 to 40 percent.

Among people who say, “I’m going off forever,” or “I’m going around the world,” the rate drops to less than 20 percent. Other people who are interested in cruising statistics have said this figure might be as low as 10 percent. There are probably dozens of reasons for these disappointments, so I find it far easier (and more enjoyable) to look for reasons certain people are successful at meeting the challenges of cruising and voyaging.

Lynn Pardey

A success rate of 20-40%! There’s a HUGE survivorship bias when it comes to sailing. Gigantic. Astronomical. When you start planning to live on a sailboat, ALL you see are the people who live and love sailboat life. The Wynns. Delos. LaVagabonde. However, when I read that post from Lin Pardey, without even trying I came up with at least ten boats that had quit or dramatically downsized their cruising plans (most of these we know personally). In the Bahamas, we got to the point where I was more surprised when fellow sailors said they were continuing with their original plans than when they announced they were heading back to FL to put the boat up for sale!

Yet when I started doing research for this post on why sailors quit, I found…almost nothing. Most sailors with an online presence do exactly what the previous owners of our boat did when they quit sailing: “We tossed our luggage onto the dock, placed Tiger in his carrier, and made our way to a hotel. It’s time to get off of the boat for awhile. We’ll keep ya posted as to where we end up!”

And that’s the last thing they wrote, followed by a photo that is definitely from the listing broker. Their blog faded off into the ether, just as many have done before them. No mention of selling the boat, no explanation for moving back to land. Another statistic for the sailor attrition rate, but nothing to help future sailors get a more realistic picture of why sailors quit, or how their story might end.

I’m proud of everything we accomplished, up to and including the decision that when things weren’t working, it was time for drastic change. If Lin’s figures are correct, we are the majority! So if you are so stoked about boat life and can’t wait until you get a boat of your own, it’s important to consider that it might not be what you expect, and you might not want to continue, and there are tons of other people who are…in the same boat (heh).

The Big Things that Sucked

I talked about the things that sucked. I feel like our experience was front-loaded with so much shit (see here, here, and definitely here, and then here, here, and especially here, and I didn’t write much about our time in the boat yard because I was so depressed, but we hauled out for a week and ended up out of the water for two months and you can see the astronomical cost of that bottom job here). And after all that misery, our reward was a single month in the Bahamas before we had to hightail it north for hurricane season.

When I go back and re-read those posts, they don’t sound too bad. Like, okay, that was probably a rough trip, but you as a reader can’t internalize the feelings of dread that lasted for hours. You, as a reader, can’t fully understand that when things get bad they get really bad. I know you can’t, because I read so many sailing blogs before we lived this life, and I never really considered that those challenging parts might overshadow the enjoyable parts. It never sucks as much when you read a single sentence about being in wildly bumpy swell for hours and hours. It never hurts as much when it’s someone else spending $9,000 at a boat yard. You don’t know what cold is until it’s Day 3 of no way to warm up.

Even after we got good at weather routing, it still wasn’t predictable enough to sail. At the top of my cons list for “Boat Life Pros and Cons” it says “we are ALWAYS. MOTORING.” We tried so hard to sail as much as we could, and we ended up with abysmal, demoralizing percentages; we engines-off sailed 20% of our second season. I compared that data to our previous month in the Bahamas, just in case we were lazy, but it wasn’t significantly different: 27%. The sails and rigging are expensive to maintain, and for how much we used them we would have been much better off with a power boat!

Fun fact: I shared that infographic on reddit and all the armchair sailors were shocked by how little we sailed. They’re all sure they could have done better. But for our cohorts, it seems we were in good company, when I’ve been able to compare data with peers we’re solidly average.

Okay, so we had shitty experiences up front, we didn’t sail enough to justify owning a sailboat. What else?

We were always the slowest boat out there. I can’t think of a single time we passed another sailboat last season. Our boat was so fantastically wonderful for living on, so spacious and awesome. She does not sail well. We thought it was just us, but I chatted with Vicky on Coco about why they were selling their Island Spirit, and the speed thing came up and she said “we kept thinking it was cause we had three teens on board so we were a lil heavy! But no matter how much we lightened up we were always the slowest too!”

It’s pretty demoralizing to be passed by every boat on the sea, especially when it was rough out. When the weather got bad and the swell got big and sailing wasn’t fun anymore, we were stuck in that crap for hours more than our peers. It meant we couldn’t make it as far in a day, or we had to choose motoring over sailing in order to make it to an anchorage before dark, or we had to leave before dawn to make it to the next anchorage while our neighbors slept in. Honestly, it wouldn’t have been a dealbreaker to me when we were buying the boat – all sailboats are slow! – but having experienced it firsthand…again, I would rather have a powerboat.

This last one is pretty personal, as in it is a result of my personal amount of anxiety, but here it is: the slow burn of stress when sailing. There were multiple times when we were at sea in some big swell, and I would sit at the helm and do all kinds of math for the next inlet that we’d enter, because if the wind opposed the tidal current when the waves were already big, the swell at the inlet could range from uncomfortable to lethal. The thing about sailing is that you only go offshore if there’s wind, and if there’s wind there’s probably a decent amount of swell, and it doesn’t take much to make big swell in the Atlantic. If I could have kept busy, I wouldn’t have had time to stress about it, but being at sea is so boring that my mind had way too much time to think about the things that could go wrong. Anxiety!

Alright, I think you’ve gotten the picture. Sailing life clearly isn’t for me, and even though Kyle handled it better, he was also very done with our sailboat by the time we put it up for sale. We had some amazing experiences, and I don’t regret any of the choices we made, it’s just that the good didn’t outweigh the bad. I have no interest in ever owning a sailboat again. Living on the water is still my favorite, and I’m sure we’ll do it again some day, but it will be a powercat or a trawler and we won’t have to mess around with sails or wait for bridges to open. We’ll be able to do more than 5 kts and we’ll plan our offshore passages for the calmest possible weather.

But enough from me, let’s open up the floor to other sailors!

Other Sailors Who Decided Move Back to Land

I reached out to some of the other boats that also downgraded their cruising plans. Keep in mind that I asked a deeply personal question, and these are the things they were willing to let me publicly post, so they may not reflect the deepest thoughts of the sharer. There’s definitely an element of political correctness to sailing, on the internet it looks like this romantic means of world travel, but in real life when sailors get together they bitch about the weather and things that break and talk about selling the boat (“and they talk about POOP!” adds Kyle).

We’ve talked to one boat a couple times, and I won’t name them here because they have a pretty huge following (30k youtube subscribers) and haven’t publicly said anything about a lifestyle change, they are solidly in the throes of “sailing life is amazing!” online. In real life, they spent years fixing up their boat before putting it in the water and taking off for parts unknown, but…they discovered their boat is absolutely not a good fit for their family. Every time we talk to them, they seem to be on the cusp of switching to a different means of travel. I’m bringing this up here because it’s a great cautionary tale: we’re not the only ones who poured love and money into a boat and then decided it wasn’t right for us! And, more importantly, no matter how popular the sailing channel, they may be actively or accidentally misrepresenting their true feelings about sailing.

Jamie from Make Memories Travel More (instagram, youtube) was on a parallel path with us as we crossed to the Bahamas this year. We tried to meet up but we were never in the same place at the same time! Their initial plan was to do some volunteering in Abaco (the area devastated by hurricane Dorian), cruise the Bahamas, then volunteer in the Dominican Republic. They never made it past Abaco, they ended up heading back to FL and put the boat up for sale! I’m sure part of the issue was their reluctance to travel at night which made it difficult to consider sailing to distant islands, but their main reason for selling the boat is that between the draw of the community in Abaco and COVID making it nearly impossible to travel, they have decided to move to Abaco and commit to their mission there! “God really pressed on our hearts for Guana and that maybe we should be there as a family and serve and mission to the island for the next year or so.” With COVID still challenging travel that plan may change as well, but a full year after Dorian there are still islands where power hasn’t been restored, so they are still in need of aid!

Jamie also added her thoughts on the challenges of sailing life: “I do feel sailboat life is a little glamorized than the real life grit of it. Weather and out running blows is a huge factor you under estimate and cabin fever is a real thing even on a boat in paradise. I have made many jokes about us buying a power cat instead because it seemed we did not get to sail near as much as we thought we would because we were always on a mission to get to a place or trying to travel in weather windows.” She makes some great points, especially the cabin fever. You don’t know what it’s like to have the weather keep you aboard at anchor for days on end until you’ve tried it!

Beth from Know Tan Lines (instagram) wrote exactly what I wanted to write, but she put it much more succinctly! She and her husband prepared for boat life with some short trips and day sails, but it’s just not the same as living aboard and traveling. “Once we were full time on the boat and trying to get to the Bahamas, we really learned that sailing was too slow for us and the weather windows we needed to cross were few and far between, and much longer than we thought we needed due to the slowness of the sailboat. Our retirement goal was to travel, but after 4 months of getting from NC to Marathon, we realized that we are about the destination, not the journey. We don’t like going 7-8 kts and we never came to love to sail. We would rather motor to get there faster and more directly.” We, too, waited a full month in Lake Worth for a weather window to cross to the Bahamas. A month! Think about that the next time you’re irritated about sitting at a stoplight!

“The straw that broke the camel’s back was insurance. We ended up getting a quote that was double our initial quote, just because our home base was accidentally changed.” We experienced challenges there too. We had insurance drop us because they “no longer cover sailing catamarans.” We paid drastically more every year we owned our boat. It was a hassle!

Vicky from Sailing Coco (website, youtube) shared the reason their family of five is moving back to land. They also owned an Island Spirit and traveled on it for two years! They moved aboard to spend time on the water and get closer as a family, according to Vicky “We wanted to see more of this world and our time with our boys was passing fast and we knew we weren’t getting any younger. Waiting until we retired and had the money was far greater a risk than starting now with the little we had. So we jumped in headfirst, sold it all and bought our floating home!” They traveled far and wide and mostly loved every minute of it!

So why give that up? Pete and Vicky’s three sons are teenagers, they’ve had their family adventure and now the boys are ready to spread their wings! “Our boys are quickly turning into young men and although they’ve shared in our dream of sailing the world they are excited to start their own journeys. Even though we’d love to keep them little forever, the time has come for our crew to begin a new chapter.”

Vicky talked a little bit about the challenges of five near-adults in such a small space, but she says they’ll definitely own another sailboat someday! Something with a little more solar, something a little faster, but they love everything about being off-grid!

I reached out to Audrey of Thisldu (instagram, website), because she has been very forthcoming about the mental challenges of sailing life, particularly as COVID trapped them in Central America…but also because they have the best boat name I’ve ever seen (although probably not great for radio). She chose not to contribute, but she did write her own blog post about why their plans are changing! You can read her thoughts here. She and her husband began traveling by boat, but a year after they set out, they’ve reestablished themselves on land with a new house and new jobs.

Part of what inspired the change is budgetary challenges, which we can commiserate with! The other part of the change is from living with uncertainty, the mental hurdles that come with full time living and traveling aboard a sailboat. I especially like what she writes about transitioning back to land – it wasn’t a shock, it was easy and comforting. I feel that way too! The only shock we’ve felt is the speed of car travel: we can cross multiple states lines in one day, it doesn’t take a week to get from one state to the next!

Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to this post! It was so interesting to hear your thoughts!

A few other resources from scouring the ‘net:

– Seek to See More sold their boat and spills: what we’ll miss and won’t miss
– Reddit asks: did anyone hate living on a boat?
– S/V Independence details why they’re selling their boat.
– followtheboat interviews a guy who decided to move back to land.
– Walde Sailing sells their boat because “they miss their land-based hobbies.”
– CruisersForum has a decent thread on “Why do cruisers quit cruising?” with a particularly insightful list of reasons from user Kinkircating (another user even gave a little shoutout to this blogpost, *blush* thanks for the kind words!).

Please Wrap It Up I’m So Tired Of Reading

When it comes down to it, sailing is only sustainable if the good outweighs the bad. The good parts and the bad parts are different for everyone, so the only truth I can really deliver here is that sailing life can be very challenging. “Why sailors quit” probably has a different answer for everyone, but there are some common threads among the answers that should not be taken lightly!