Uncharted Waters: At Sea in a Pandemic
As we’re all feeling unmoored right now in the midst of this pandemic, we thought it might be a good moment to check in with John Kim, who is literally at sea.
Last year, Kim and his wife Amanda decided to leave their jobs in Los Angeles (John with the corporate social responsibility team at The Walt Disney Company, Amanda as chief marketing officer of a consumer products start-up) and move with their two young kids back to Vermont, where Amanda is from, “and is a place we just love,” Kim told me. “In leaving L.A. and our jobs, we weren’t running away from anything—we were just going toward a different future that we wanted.”
But Amanda’s father had a detour in mind for them: to join him on his 38-foot sailboat for a year, to sail along the Atlantic coast of the U.S. and to the Caribbean. Having lived and traveled around the world, John and Amanda intended at some point to go on an overseas adventure with their kids, so they decided to seize the opportunity and shipped out last September. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, they decided to stay on the boat.
We thought that someone pursuing the life he wants—in a very small space with his family—might have some helpful reflections for quarantined landlubbers. We caught up with him by email, from where he’s currently sheltering in place on the boat in a bay on St. John, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. (We lightly edited his answers for brevity and clarity.)
Having now spent seven months in a small space with kids, what advice do you have for families now stuck at home?
There’s no sense of privacy; there’s nowhere to go when you want to be alone (especially hard when we’re at sea, rather than anchored or moored with the option of going to the beach or for a hike). This has been a challenge for all ages of people on the boat.
For Amanda and me, our time serving in the Peace Corps in Morocco together prepared us well for this adventure. While we weren’t constrained physically by space as we are now, we were still living under restrictions and in a setting where we were with each other 24/7, as opposed to going off to our offices, seeing work friends, commuting, etc. for eight to nine hours a day.
My advice for those stuck at home now would be to prioritize physical activity. Even if the kids are like, ”Ugh, I just want to read a book,” we try our best to get them moving and to burn off some energy! As best as you can, get out for a walk, kick around a soccer ball, ride a bike, have a dance party... Do something to help them burn off energy and have some fun.
For the adults, make sure to carve out time for yourself—and it doesn't have to be at night once everyone is asleep. If you need to go for a run, do some email, read for a little bit, or just veg out and crush some candy, it’s OK to tell people to get out of your face or to be a bit self-sufficient while you do what you need to do.
What has surprised you the most?
How flexible and adaptable our children are. They were thrown, not by their own choice, into living on a sailboat in a tiny space, without their friends, soccer, school, etc., and have rolled with everything without much of a complaint. They’ve had sea sickness, had to eat things they didn’t want, had to go on hikes they didn’t want, but they always eventually came through. Their flexibility and ability to laugh in all situations have surprised me the most.
What has been the hardest?
We are living on my father-in-law’s sailboat. Living in someone else's home, as gracious a host as they can be, for this long of a period has had its challenges. Not the showering once every few weeks, not the using a pump toilet, not the living in a space where everything needs to be unpacked to find any given item, not the cooking on a gimbaled stove where you never know if everything you’re cooking is going to fall out, not the rinsing dishes with a freshwater spray bottle to conserve water, and not the doing dishes and laundry by hand. Those have required adjustments and just a sense of getting used to it.
But the feeling of living in someone else's space is always there and, to me, has been the most difficult. However, living through these times with someone who is extremely kind, has only the best interests of all of us in mind, especially those of his grandkids, knows how to fix everything and anything, and on a well-stocked boat, is probably the best place to be.
Clearly, living at sea is a lot of work. What, if anything, have you missed about your “normal” work life?
I love having the time to brush my daughter’s hair (and that she wants me to do it).
I miss being part of a larger team/effort and having clear targets you’re all aiming for. But besides that and the wonderful colleagues I left, to be honest, I don’t miss much from my previous “normal” work life. I love spending all day with my kids and my wife. I love not spending my time commuting on L.A.’s freeways. I love not rushing through the weekends from activity to activity to make sure we get it all in. I love having the time to brush my daughter’s hair (and that she wants me to do it).
How have your kids fared on this adventure, and what do you hope they’ll gain from it?
I hope that they’ll remember this time they spent together and with us. I hope when we all get back to busy lives, friends, different school classrooms, they remember how much fun they had together doing things like building rock and coral forts, doing LEGOs for hours, being in the same classroom. In the longer term, I hope they take this love and respect for nature and the ocean that they’ve enhanced, and continue to integrate that into their lives, be it their educational interests, careers, or hobbies. I also hope they recognize the “nontraditional” choices we, as their parents, made and know that they can do that too. They don’t need to do what everyone else thinks they should do or what is considered “normal.”
Taking a year off work to live on a sailboat obviously requires financial resources. How did you make it possible?
We have always tried to live well within our means and to be ready for rainy days. We were also fortunate to sell our house in Los Angeles and knew we were moving to a much more affordable housing market in Vermont. As for the boat itself, it’s my father in-law’s boat. We help with provisioning and other expenses during the trip but otherwise there aren’t many expenses while sailing, since we take our home (and kitchen) with us!
As the Coronavirus started to spread, why did you decide to stay at sea, and how did the pandemic change things for you?
It took awhile for us to grasp what was happening. Being at sea and being less connected to the internet has generally been a blessing. But as we learned more about Coronavirus and we saw that it was impacting plans for friends and family to visit, we started to get more informed. And as we learned more, it became pretty clear that we were in probably the best spot we could be: on a sailboat, away from others, on a small island in the Caribbean.
While that feeling lasted for a while, as the news progressed and got worse, and we heard about more of the Caribbean nations closing borders or imposing more restrictions on boats, it caused us to do longer-term scenario planning. It has now forced us to think about our resources (fresh water, food, propane) and facing the prospect of having to be totally self-sufficient for three months or longer. It has caused us to think about how we would get home if, God forbid, something happened to our family members. These are questions we’re still figuring out, but overall we feel like we couldn’t be any luckier to be on a sailboat, with our kids, with a half a year of homeschooling under our belts, and “stuck” in a beautiful place in the Caribbean.
When you embarked on your journey, what did you think your work and life would look like upon your return, and how has that vision changed now, under the new reality of COVID-19?
I was really excited to start a job, working remotely, with a small purpose-driven company and to be part of its next phase of growth. They, like all small businesses, have been impacted by COVID-19, so my role is on pause for now. Working in Vermont has always been the biggest question mark prior to our moving, so I was pretty excited to have that final part of the puzzle figured out. We’re still excited to return to Vermont but now we’ll just have to adjust and figure out what the future will look like.
My hope is that the company will come out of this crisis stronger and that I’ll be able to join them in the future. But I know that the future is uncertain for everyone right now, so I'm open to whatever opportunities life presents—like the one that landed me on this boat in the first place!
What do you hope for as a silver lining of this pandemic?
As people who try to think like this in our professional lives, we’ve thought about ways that this awful crisis can be turned into a positive. We know that the vast reduction in travel around the world and industrial output has reduced carbon emissions. We know that people have spent more time with their children than they normally do. While the cause is terrible, these are good things. When/if things go back to normal, how do we bake some of these positive behavior changes (as individuals and companies) into our “new normal”? I think this is an opportunity for individuals, companies, and governments to acknowledge that what we were doing before wasn’t working and to find new models for life, work, and governing.
Update: On April 12, the Kims decided to jump ship and return to land-based living, realizing that if they stayed at sea much longer, they might not be able to come to shore anywhere for a long time. Kim told us they were sad to end the adventure—that they knew they'd return to “normal” at some point, but obviously didn't realize that it would be a whole new normal. As he wrote to us, “One adventure ends and another begins.”
Are there big adventures that you have in the works, had to cancel, or are now inspired to plan for the future? How has the pandemic shaped your thinking about what lies ahead in your life—and what is in it today? Tell us at hello@thelifeiwant.co.
Photo courtesy John Kim.
