Mosaic Family Voyage: Sailing Away From the American Dream

In 2014 I was a regular, young Clark County mom with a husband, a 4-year-old son, a newborn daughter, a full time job and a home in Battle Ground, complete with mortgage and mounting expenses. Little did my husband and I know then that watching a single documentary would change the entire course of our lives and land us living on a 40-something-year-old sailboat and preparing to cast off the dock lines to go sail the world.

By 2014, Brenden and I had become quite disillusioned with our life. We were both working full time jobs and had a roommate to help spread the financial load, and yet we were still barely scraping by each month. Most of my wages were going to pay for daycare for our son and we didn’t know how we would manage when it came time to add our daughter’s daycare expenses into the mix once my maternity leave expired. I had already started dreaming of downsizing into a tiny home and living mortgage-free when we happened upon “Maidentrip,” a documentary about a 14-year-old Dutch girl named Laura Dekker who sailed solo around the world on her 40-foot sailboat. My husband, Brenden, commented that she seemed normal—not the super-wealthy type we’d imagined for sailing enthusiasts. He became curious. When he suggested that our tiny home might be a sailboat, allowing us to travel and see the world, work less, and spend every day with our kids, I was all in.

Read the rest of this article in the full digital issue below.