#sealongingselkie
Sealonging Selkie
Sailing—Exploring
Welcome to Maggie Hirt's Sea Adventures, where the ocean comes alive with stories of wonder, discovery, and the call of the deep blue. Join Maggie Hirt, an intrepid explorer and storyteller, as she takes you on captivating journeys across oceans with her entire family.
Life Onboard
Westerly 49
In June of 2017, we left Ohio and Michigan waters for a life aboard Selkie. We got to know her with a year sailing in the Caribbean, then crossing the Atlantic, via Bermuda and the Azores, and a year in Ireland and Scotland. The following summer, we sailed the North Sea, visited the fjords of Norway, stopped in Denmark, and circled the Baltic Sea. In winter of 2020, we sailed southwest England, crossed the Bay of Biscay, enjoyed Galicia, Spain, crossed to the Canary Islands, sailed south to Cape Verde, and crossed the ocean back to the Caribbean. In 2021, we visited and spent months cruising St Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, then Sint Maarten and the Dominican Republic. During hurricane season, our boat was tucked in safely in Rio Dulce, Guatemala, for a refit. In 2022, we traversed the Panama Canal, sailed to the Galapagos, crossed the vast Pacific, and enjoyed French Polynesia (Marquesas, Tuamotus Atolls, Tahiti, Moorea, and Bora Bora). We finished the Pacific via Tonga's Vava'u, then down to New Zealand. Via sailing and traveling by campervan for 7 months, we explored all the we could have of North and South Island, NZ. At the end of 2024, we crossed the Tasman Sea and rejoined the Pacific again seeing 2025 in Fijian waters. Currently, we are home in Toledo, OH, USA to let the children navigate some traditional school. Fingers crossed for this land decision that also involves some travels. We plan to return to Selkie in the summer of 2025.
Homeschool Aboard
Mom, as a third generation teacher, leads the way.
In the past eight school years, we have paired 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! For a social experiment, we are letting the kids try traditional school in Toledo, Ohio. What an adventure that will be!
Future Plans
2025-2026
We are exploring land life for a bit. In 2024 and into 2025, we waited for a weather window to continue our journey from NZ up to Fiji. We hope to move her again during the summer over to Australia, onwards through the Torres Strait, Darwin, Bali, Singapore, Western Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Maldives, and then decide on the Mediterranean or South Africa. Sail on! The Indian Ocean will be our next home.
"I need the sea because it teaches me."
Pablo Neruda
Subscribe and follow The Selkie Adventure with Real Stories on YouTube.
Sample of a fun YouTube Video where we race minicat guppies
Track Selkie
View us in real time as we circumnavigate.
1st Book with Poetry AND PROSE
Sail alongside Magdalena and her family to lose yourself in post-apocalyptic survival, mountain-summiting thunder, moon-cratered wonderment, endless-ocean visions, heart-stealing waves, and the grabbing, giving wind that will harness you to words. Dare to share the courage that it takes to leave everything behind with a family in tow and find excitement in not knowing what comes next. It will make you grab a railing, think on promises, and want to live in the South Pacific.
Her Bloody Project
...is a creative response to His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet. It follows the same form as Burnet’s novel, but it is filled with poetry that deals with being raped at the age of sixteen. This is my past, which can haunt me still, but by ekphrastically responding to another author’s creativity, it promotes a literary ripple of healing.
“Magdalena Louise Hirt's Her Bloody Project is a courageous and clear-eyed interrogation of both a fictional text and of a traumatic episode in the author’s own life. But it is far more than just a literary response. It is a superb piece of work in its own right, forensically examining the manifold effects of sexual violence on the author. It is bold, intelligent, defiant and, above all, beautifully written.”
—Graeme Macrae Burnet, author of His Bloody Project
New Poetry Chapbook! Available Now!
Pacific Prescription: Leukemia Cyclone
4th Poetry Chapbook in Pre-Sales
A storm, engine problems, or a ripped sail can halt your sailing dreams. For this traveling family of six, it was not weather, mechanics, or techniques, it was leukemia. From the middle of the Pacific, after the Marquesas, the Tuamotu Atolls, and Tahiti, sailing had to come to an abrupt stop. Just living life became the challenge. Poet Magdalena Hirt and her family stayed State-side to save her brother who was diagnosed with AML Leukemia, and then returned to continue their journey onwards to Moorea and Bora Bora. In Pacific Prescription: Leukemia Cyclone, there are poems of dreams and poems of survival. In sequential order, these poems tell the story of the ocean and sacrifice.
Pacific Pieces
A Third Poetry Chapbook with more custom stories to bring you into my adventures! Order here!
Traverse the Gulf of Honduras, go through the Panama Canal, discover the Galapagos, and cross the first half of the Pacific Ocean to the Marquesas by simply picking up this book of poetry.
Her Sea-filled Arms:
Layers of Blue
Second Poetry Chapbook! Order now!
Her Sea-filled Arms: Layers of Blue shares poems that drop down through the blue colors of the Canary Islands off of Portugal, to Cape Verde off of Africa, across the Atlantic Ocean through the Caribbean, over to the Dominican Republic and into Guatemala with a family of six on a sailboat called Selkie. The water sparkles and swallows, and their arms reach and breathe. The galaxy becomes their nest, and the children complex planets. The author, Magdalena Hirt, captures wind, stretches sails, raises sailors, doges squalls, harnesses life, moves with moonlight, whispers with depths, floats with phosphorescence, contemplates earth, holds mystery, listens to waves tell stories, swings with memories, and falls madly in love.
Debut Chapbook for Sale:
Levels of the Ocean
Poetry Chapbook! Available Now!
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!
Article in Enchanted Living
"Pre-dawn Sea Secrets"
Pull anchor up from a tiny stone bay with a cave. Sail softly over the sea so calm and eerie, silver and slithering still. Drop anchor cozy and snug at an empty island you’ve been reading about surrounded with cliffs and birds. Walk the huge rocks off the shore that contain so many stories of survival, exploration, and history. Feel magic in the moment. Pull anchor again and head north with hot tea in hand finding room on the sea.
1st Published Article
Cruising World January 2021 "Wintering Aboard in the Scottish Highlands"
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.
Meet Daddy: aka Captain Nick
Sailing since childhood, he is a jack-of-all-trades, and a master of fun!
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Meet Momma: aka Teacher/Writer
She is a sailing, sassy momma that enjoys being a teacher, writer, wife, mother, and galley goddess.
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Meet Tristan (18)
Made from boat life, Tristan is comfortable onboard as a sailor, being a big brother, a writer, and an adventurer.
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Meet Lily (16)
Lily is a sweet and understanding sister that enjoys drawing, cooking, writing, and Netflix.
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Meet Mara (11)
Mara in the middle is willing to rile up any kind of fun and hopes to be a pop star or the first woman on Mars!
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Meet Rory (8)
Rory is Selkie-raised and learned to walk onboard. He's actually in charge of us all.
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