SEALONGING SELKIE

Our family of six, Nick (dad), Maggie (mom), Tristan (15), Lily (13), Mara (8), and Rory (6), sail the world to breathe and live.

HOMESCHOOL ABOARD

Mom, as a third generation teacher, leads the way.

In the school year to come, we will pair with Moving Beyond the Page, Oak Meadow, and Math-U-See with additional books, art, and musical instruments to make living onboard just as educational as life on land. Adding travel, like historic sites, museums, and cultural experiences, is the best education a child can get. Boat kids are the best kids!

FUTURE PLANS

Winter 2021

We are officially Pacific Cruisers! Our family is enjoying the islands of this vast ocean for 2022.

NEW PUBLICATION: 
LEVELS OF THE OCEAN

Poetry Chapbook (pre-order available here)! Release March 18, 2022.

Levels of the Ocean is poetry written by a sailing mother on a night watch. When it begins, she is new to live-aboard sailing, but as you progress through the poems, you grow with her on overnight crossings. The poems take you from the Carribean Seas where “moist tongues told truths,” over the North Atlantic where the “ocean whispers,” through the Thames and the Baltic Sea with “soft moves that settle on the skin,” then across the Bay of Biscay to a sound that is “like gods fighting from below.” Eventually, in the ocean off of Portugal, the sails “bang, clang, creak, hull smash, wave break, whomp,” which gives you a “strange embrace.” At the darkest moment, environmentally, mentally, she confronts “expectations towards death,” and lastly, finally, messages and life “seeps through the hull into dreams.” Enjoy this poetic, sailing adventure!

My live-aboard family of six has docked. We pull off our Irish sailing Duberries and slip into our knee-high Wellies. We step off the boat onto the floating pontoon at Oban Marina, and stretch our legs after crossing the North Atlantic and sailing up the Irish Sea. When I put on my Wellies, my sea body becomes a land body again. I walk through the boatyard, and trudge through the muddy paths, and my sailing soul is filled with the piece of land my heart needs. Floating offshore aboard Selkie is the life we have chosen, but this land, this place, the family of Oban Marina and Kerrera is a home we chose for the Winter....

“Another storm is coming. Double check your lines.” Yes. Of course, just another huge wind spiraling in off the North Atlantic. It’s like living inside the tornado that takes Dorothy over the rainbow, and if you can endure the rigging slapping in the wind that whistles through the highlands to your hatches, the water slapping the hull, and the dock lines stretching, squeaking and pulling, you truly live in a brightly colorful, magical land of adventure. Every week one blows through, and we get use to it like a weekend. It becomes a two-day family holiday aboard—we hang tight, listen to Selkie get yanked back and forth, cook a giant pot of spicy chili in the galley, get hands-on our homeschool work, or explore another mechanical endeavor in need of improvement. When the storm settles, and everything is still, we can hear distant hairy cows moo, laughter, dogs, and an announcement of the CalMac ferry across the bay.

CONTACT

sealongingselkie@gmail.com