LDS Family Leaves Broadway, Sails For A Year

Eric and Emily Orton did something crazy. They left their jobs, they left Broadway and New York, and they took their famil sailing on the ocean for a year? Would you do that? I would!

 Raw Transcript

all right this episode is a little bit different bring on my friends uh Eric and Emily Orton who took their family
and went and lived on a sailboat for a year this is something that I've always wanted to do uh big fantasy of mine to
be able to go out and get off the grid actually solar wind and live on a
catamaran and uh so this was very intriguing to me i've done a lot of sailing growing up uh and it's something
that I've always wanted to do and have never done it and here they have done this so uh really interesting to see how
they prepared for this they've got a great story on this uh what it does for them and for their kids to separate
themselves out in uh on their own and and do their own traveling and live on this catamaran uh it's it's very
interesting so hope you'll uh uh listen all the way through on this and and I don't know tell me what you think tell
me what you think is this something that you would do this episode is brought to you by Momentum 26
uh and go and do travel this is uh next year's go and do this is an incredible event where you have hundreds of
Latter-day Saints where you have entertainment you've got excursions out to the shore you've got your uh edifying
presentations you meet everyone you you make new friends it's it's an incredible
experience there's really nothing like it so go to quickdia.com go to the top and go to quick or go to
trips and events and scroll down to momentum 26 and find out more here we
[Music]
go all right welcome to Quick Show my name is Greg Matson and I am your host in this
episode we bring on Eric and Emily Orton who I met a few weeks ago on the
Momentum West cruise guys how are you doing doing so well thanks for having us it was so fun to meet you yeah great to
be on a boat together and Yeah in person great to be on a podcast together now yeah yeah fun stuff you know what it's I
I I love what you guys have done i love your story i am so unbelievably jealous because I want to do this uh you guys
spent a year is that right a year sailing with your family that's right yeah living on a boat okay so yeah I it
has taken me 30 years 30 years to get my wife on board no pun
intended to to get her to say "Okay yeah I would love to go off the grid and
actually live on a sailboat and just sail the world and at least for part of the year." And and and so we're kind of
moving toward that right now that's what we'd love to do so I I I I love hearing this type of thing and what what I want
to do is I want to talk your story is really compelling and I think there's so much so many uh lessons that you you you
have taken from this and so I want to go over those as well will you guys just start with your story what was going on
how in the world did you end up going from where you were in New York to to
saying "Hey we're going to go out and leave everything behind and and take our five kids and just live on a boat on the
ocean." Oh yeah we'd love to share this i mean I think for me it was the biggest surprise
i never would have expected this for myself because my starting point or my intro point I think I was about 35 years
old and I was still afraid of the deep end of the swimming pool traumatized by commercials for Jaws so I'll just let
Eric take it from there just putting out there how unlikely of a participant I
was in this so I understand you're playing the long game if it took your wife 30 years to decide that was a good
idea that's not unusual and it's no fun if they don't want to be there so you're taking the right path you want to take
it yeah for sure so yeah we were living in New York our kids were We had a We
had three kids at the time and I was working in the theater industry i I managed Broadway shows and tours that's
why we were living in New York and I had left the show Wicked i was I was
managing the tour of Wicked and I left that to launch out and do something on my own and the show raised all the money
and everything it was a beautiful production but it was a complete financial flop but it was a show about a
family that moves aboard a boat yeah the the deep deep irony of it is that it was a show about Noah's arc so it was sort
of family of eight on a boat yeah it wasn't until our book Seven at Sea came
out that our agent asked that question and I told her what the show was and she's like really like you can't even
make this stuff up before I forget I want to just go on a little bit of a tangent here that is a really interesting comparison i had never
thought about that noah's arc it's like it's like I mean just going into what
you guys are going to do it's like okay we're going to separate ourselves from the rest of the world essentially i mean
to some degree right that that's Yeah i've never even thought about that yeah to some degree and at least participating in that show it's really
interesting because the family is together and when you're together like that and there's really nowhere else
you're going to hide your flaws and your frustrations and your your sort of
conflicts with one another and so it's like here I am this is me yeah this is me and I and I can't like go take a
break on the other side of town and come back refreshed you know it's like we're here so that was a good preview still
not expecting that we would ever do something like that but when it came to our turn we realized
that was true and that can be one of the hard parts and one of the amazing benefits it's like you just can't run away from that you have to deal with it
but here go ahead and tell cuz we you said we had three kids but we were well on our way to four yeah we were we were
expecting our fourth and so I had this show just tank and uh I had to but I
still had to feed my family so I went and I got a temp job downtown and I was
um in in lower Manhattan in the financial district and I was just actually I'll say
this opening night of the show the ark that I was telling you about Emily went into labor and gave birth to our fourth
child our son yeah a after the party the next day after the show opened we after
the opening night party and then we I disappeared for a day i told my
producing partner I was just going to be off grid and be with my family it was literally 19 hours yeah and while I was
in the hospital the reviews came out and her and our management team made the
decision that the show didn't have legs and that they were going to post a provisional closing notice without
checking with me the lead producer and I came out of the hospital and found
out that we were now the show was going to close we were going to lose all of our
money all of our investors money and I was going to be unemployed and I was going to feel absolutely humiliated uh
because uh within a week I ended up on the cover of a magazine called Cranes
Business New York on a for a roundup article about why the off Broadway business model was broken and so it was
seriously friends taking cabs around town would text him and be like "Canes really Eric?" you know just like finding
his face on the cover and I have to say like it continued because um as they put
out different editions they for whatever reason liked that cover so much they used it as the ad for get your own
subscription and so for years it just continued on and on like here's my face the the poster boy
for failure so so you know I just I really I just found myself devastated really and yet I had
to pick you know after a few weeks of feeling sorry for myself I had to pick myself up and get back to work just to
take care of our family and I got a job lower Manhattan working nights as a temp
at an investment bank and I was I just wanted to disappear i didn't have a phone on my desk i didn't want to talk
to anybody i wasn't telling anybody where I was or what I was doing and it was just a really really hard time and I
would take these dinner breaks and walk along the Hudson River cuz my office was right down by the by the Hudson River
and I would see these sailboats kind of around sunset and I'd be on the phone with Emily and we'd be talking through
how to dig ourselves out of the hole that we found ourselves in and I would describe to her what I'm seeing and she
could tell that something was kind of clicking in me and she said "You know maybe you need to take a little closer
look at this." And when I found out that the boats were coming out of a sailing
school immediately downstairs from where I work she got persistent and she said "I think you need to explore this i
think you can you need something like this right now as you're recovering." And I'm like "Hey you know we're barely
covering the bills i don't I'm not going to like pick up sailing as a hobby because what I knew about sailing was
that you had to be rich you had to be well connected and you had to uh maybe
have some kind of history have grown up around boats and you probably need to enjoy drinking none of which are true
for me yeah we always would you always see the people out there either on board or afterwards just having a drink and
going over the Sure the sail together so she really persisted and finally I got
up the guts to go down to work early one day and I went down to the dock and I
stepped across into this school because it was just kind of like a floating housebo type thing in the marina and I
walked in i was like "Hey I don't know anything about sailing how does this work?" And that was really the beginning
and they said "If you wanted to be in a class you could do evenings or you could
do weekends." And I was in a bishop brick at the time so I couldn't really do weekends and I worked nights so I couldn't do evenings and so they said
"Well if you get four people together we'll create a custom class for you." I asked everybody neighbors co-workers you
know people at church nobody wanted to team up with me so finally I said "Hey Emily what if you and our two oldest
girls who were nine and 11 at the time what if we all get together and make a
class?" And so we started taking sailing classes every Friday afternoon and uh
yeah and that's when I knew he was so serious because money was a real issue i was like well it was going to be hard
just to afford it for you and now it's going to be four of us plus we now have to pay for a babysitter while we're gone
like it became parking and lower and parking yeah and parking tickets and anyway it became like an expensive
threshold but it was part of what helped me know how serious Eric was about it
because he's like I'll pick up contract this seemed just like a dream to you though Emily was it like okay he's just
dreaming here and this this seemed like I knew he he had been so down it was so
disappointing the you know the the business reversal and it was when he
talked about the boats it was something where he felt enthusiasm right it's our default nature to grow and he did not
want to grow where he was and this was something that had sparked his interest and so as a wife I wanted that for him i
didn't really want it for me i didn't want to take the class i told him like I'm afraid of deep water i don't want to
go out in the water i you know I don't like the Hudson like it's it's great for what it does but it's dirty right it's
Anyway I never even would go in it just standing on the shoreline so he said
"Well that's a good reason for you to take sailing lessons then if you know how to sail you never have to go in
water you can be on land and then you can be on boat and then you can be on land again and you never get in the water." He was kind of like
accommodating my fear at this level and I eventually went into sales
yeah the kids were so excited about it
and so I anyway I decided to go for it and join them but I was really really
nervous about it and once we got out on the first day and I think I don't know if this is true for everybody else but
one of the things I love about being a parent is that when you need to lead out for someone that you really love it kind
of mitigates your own fears you know I have to handle a spider or a mouse or
hey we're going on a sailboat i need I need to lead out and kind of set the example for them whereas if it was just
me going I oh I' I would have probably been a lot more afraid but I I knew I
wanted to you know show them that this was something they could do and so it
made me a little braver as well and we had a good time and we went out the first the first time and I don't know I
felt like a little bit of a prodigy because everyone else got seasick and I was just like wind in my face you know
standing up um by the forail and having a great time the seasickness eventually
did catch up to me um on the second lesson but the first lesson I was like "Oh I'm a natural." Now in New York how
much of a year are you able to go out and do that that's a really that's up for debate in
our family oh yeah that's true this was this was a class so it was a finite
number of weeks that we were taking this class yeah it was a summer so it was just a few weeks um but yeah they say it
starts I think in April eric feels like it starts in March as soon as they put
the boats in the water he like we're in snow pants i I know that the first day of spring is March 20th cuz that's my
birthday and so I'm like look it's spring we can go sailing and I don't care what temperature it is you just dress for the weather and you go and so
my kids my poor kids eventually would be like out there freezing in coats and hats and we'd be sailing in the Long
Island Sound the second week of March third week of March and the the boat owners would be like "Are you sure we're
the only ones out there." Oh yeah we had the whole We had the whole sound to ourselves so yeah I you know I say middle of March through middle of
October yeah so everyone else is like Easter through Labor Day yeah so it
started we took the class and then we ended up going as a family and having a
really terrible experience just losing stuff overboard shouting at each other babies crying people pointing at us and
laughing and we're like maybe this isn't really for us but now you know how to sail and we were both um certified in
the first couple of um American Sailing Association classes and we kind of put
it on hold and he kept sailing with friends cuz they didn't want to take the class but they were happy to pitch in
and share the cost of a boat and go out on a Saturday and as he kind of got more comfortable as a captain um he started
saying well you know he was working nights he was in a bishop brick and now he's spending his free time going
sailing with friends and he kind of was like I want to spend a little more time as a family maybe we should give this a
try again now that I have my head wrapped around it and I can know what to anticipate and I can give a little
better guidance um to everyone else on the boat and so we tried it again and it was much much better and we started we
joined this sailing club this it's called a yacht club which I think is so funny cuz the boats are like the size of
a couple of picnic tables and there's no motor and um
no no frrills it's all beat up you know but it was cheaper than getting cable
and we could go out we'd go out two three times a month as a family and it was so um maybe a little bit like Noah's
arc without the devastation that we're away we have no cell service we just look at each other read aloud sing aloud
take turns um at the tiller so the kids started to develop that skill sometimes if it was warm they would you know hop
off the boat and swim around for a little while sometimes we'd get keeled over and get tipped in you know just So
you say tiller so so what kind of I mean for the class what kind of boat are you talking about here what What boat were you in oh yeah i think they were J24s
okay yeah they're so small so no you Yeah no motors they would just take us out on a launch boat to it it would be
tied to a moing ball we'd put up the sails and we would just go out into the sound and um yeah they were very very
simple boats it was sort of like two benches down the sides where we would sit as a family and a little bit of a cubby underneath the mass where you
could go and a lot of times our our youngest daughter would go in there with our middle child while we got everything
set up it was so small that just getting the sails set up you know the boom the
this big metal bar that comes across the length of the boat you could get hit i know a couple times you ended up with a
bloody head and so it was just like hey little kids small people you go below until we're all set up because we now
had a baby we had our fifth child our daughter Lily with Down syndrome and so her her brother Eli and then our third
daughter they would be relegated to that little cubby and the rest of us would rig the boat and then we go sailing but yeah J I think they were
J24s and yeah we we took we took out a J24 once i didn't know this you know
down in Dana Point California they had a J24 that we rented um I saw the sign
when we got back but we had we had gone out and and grabbed a bunch of L you know things for lunch and and take it
out for the day and and I you know I was you know I'm not I'm not an expert sailor but you know I've sailed quite a
bit and uh so we take this J24 and we take it you know out into the open ocean
and that's what I want to do that's what I like doing and I come back and I bring it in and I see these guys looking at us
and we come back to the dock and there's this sign that says "Please keep boats in the
harbor." Whoops like oh okay i'm I'm glad I didn't see that before we left
better to ask for forgiveness than permission right yes yeah yeah i feel that i I know we we go to places and we
climb all around and then we come back no climbing oh yeah so you So you guys So you So you
you go through the classes you you start taking out the boats a lot more and and then and then you start hatching a plan
you start getting an idea eric you got something you got a scratch here what's going on yeah so I think Yeah i didn't
know about any plan at all i thought we had peaked out and this was like our new normal and this is our life our kids are
going to grow up developing this skill in a few hours a afternoon but I was not
correct so yeah one day I'm slowly hatching this plan in my mind and
I think about it i'm watching YouTube videos as we all do and kind of getting
getting ideas and I it's a it's a beautiful morning in our apartment it's in you know
I did we just lose Greg no you're still there we're good okay for some reason you went away and now all we see is Yeah
I'm just I'm just highlighting you right now oh sorry about that you can edit this out right okay go ahead so so I
come up to Emily one day and our kids are all playing and the sun's sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh sh shining through the window and I put my arm around her and I say Emily I think the
seven of us on a sailboat would be enough universe for me and she's like what are you talking
about and maybe you can tell yeah no I had a lot of different thoughts going on in my
head but it feels like a moment of divine intervention where I just said like look is he serious about this has
he really thought about this is he just blowing smoke so I just said when would you want to go and I was really
impressed because he actually had thought about it and he he wanted to go
as a whole family he wanted to go while we have our kids he wanted them to be part of that experience he wanted to be
more engaged in their lives and I know before we said he was in the bishop work and then he was a bishop and um then he
wasn't you know and he was like I want to be in our kids' lives you know more
and be with them so yes I think for him it was number one adventure and number
two family and for me it was number one family and number two adventure so we
were we were pretty close i might have I might have picked a different adventure and we thought about all different kinds
of things that we could do as a family but this was the one where we had the most control so I said "When would you
want to go?" He wanted to go before our oldest left for college that gave us
like 3 or 4 years from that point and so
we started looking in earnest to be honest from my heart I hoped that it would you know peter out at some point
that he would say like "Oh well we tried these big boat oh we're we're priced out." Or "Oh this is these boats are too
complicated." Or "Oh you know maybe I actually just like toodling around the sound." At no point did that ever happen
and so finally you know we're actually again taking on extra work and we took
some more classes in the British Virgin Islands during hurricane season because it was cheaper then but we had a great
time the world's best sailing instructor um who we actually just went out uh to
dinner with last week yeah we just got back from the Virgin Islands two days ago taking a group out
and on that trip we were we were on like what a 50
40 47 foot 47 foot monohole called Barnaby and um I kept staying on deck
while everyone else kept going in the water and I just thought like we are talking about we want to live on a
sailboat with our kids we're telling our kids this is what we want to do this is why we're here taking these lessons to see you know how it would work to get um
more certification on bigger boats you don't have to if you're just going to go buy your own boat but we wanted to explore varieties and see what would be
the best fit for us and instead of it sort of fizzling out it was just growing
and growing and I just realized this it's not going to be sustainable for me to not get in the water and that's not a
good example for my kids like I mentioned earlier and so for me that was a transformative trip
because everyone else else was off snorkeling and I just had to buck up and
and give it a try i said if I can just be brave for 5 minutes I'll put my face in the water you know I jumped in with
some fins and a mask and it was really scary even though the water was only 15t
deep I'd never gotten out in in water that deep before and um a a big creature went past me and it
turns out it was only a sea turtle but it really spooked me and so then I was just kicking like a crazy person and
praying and you know and I made it to the reef and then everything changed
it's so different than watching a nature movie and I felt like I was inside
um you know in Finding Nemo or something like that just purple sea fans and
golden brain coral and I could hear the little tap tap tap of fish pecking away um and just fish and all different
colors and there was what I know now is called a parrot fish and it has a very smiley friendly face and it kind of was
like the matra there to greet me to the reef and kind of show me around and I just started following it and I
completely forgot to be afraid and it it was such a surprise i thought
that fear was so deep i thought it was part of my identity and it turns out it was I've heard this phrase it was like
um a mile wide but only an inch deep so once I pushed past that inch it opened
up this whole new world for me and Eric found me and wanted to swim back and
together and I said I don't want to swim back like this is my new favorite thing and so for me that was such a huge
experience because it opened up the ocean it gave me some actual enthusiasm for this instead of just like well we'll
see how far my husband's going to go with this i really joined the project at
that point in my heart and um and then it just changed my
relationship to fear because then I realized things I'm afraid of I can just head straight at them that I'm probably
afraid of them because there's something good for me on the other side so that was a huge step in our overall journey
and then yeah do you want to Yeah then we got home we were we were excited about it and we were officially able now
to charter boats we had enough of enough training credentials that we could
charter boats and so we started to do that we would get a boat we first we took out some other couples in the
Virgin Islands then we took our kids out in Florida in the Florida Keys so that they could try it out i started to do
help people move their boats from one place to another for a variety of reasons and my skill set kept growing
and and I got more and more confident and we would talk about it all the time with our kids and one day this was right
after we got back from the Caribbean or the Virgin Islands our our oldest daughter who was 14 at the time she said
"I hear you guys talking about living on a sailboat a lot but do you actually have the guts to do it?" and she wasn't
being belligerent maybe a little bit but I think she she genuinely wanted to help
manage her expectations and then her siblings because they were all on this emotional roller coaster of are we going
to pick up everything and go live as a family on a boat or not or not because and we talked about it a lot and those
conversations were important because it helped the kids surface all of their questions and concerns and we talked
through all of them and so when we eventually did go it was not out of the blue we didn't blindside our kids it
wasn't just "Hey kids here's what's happening we're gonna yank you away from your life that you know it was very
purposeful and everyone was aware which I think worked one was one of the reasons why it worked out as well as it
did." I remember the the time we ordered life vests for ourselves we have a
little video of it and and the box came and so excited everyone got their own life fest it felt like like this was
really happening we had something tangible in our home about us going sailing and our um youngest I mean she
was just toddling around at that point and she got her life fest on and the middle child our daughter SJ just gave
her a big hug and said now you'll never drown and I was like wow there's some fears going on here there was a lot of
enthusiasm but there was also an awareness like so the kids were all I mean again the pun here that the kids were all on board for this I mean they
were like what about school what about their friends I mean that's you know for yeah also that that's a major change for
them their whole social structure is is going to going to be different that was a huge consideration and I think maybe
one of the benefits of living in New York City because it wasn't like everyone in the building went to the same school and played at the same place
after school it was you know in our building all the kids who live there were all over the city for their school
situation whatever it was it's kind of every man for themsel and where you can get in and what program is the right fit
for your kids so it wasn't like they were leaving a a group of kids that they did every single thing with but they
definitely had friends we were already we didn't start this way but by this point we were already homeschooling and
we were part of an incredible co-op and we would get together for field trips
and learning experiences and and playtime and so we had a really good thing going there but they also knew it
was going to be temporary they thought it would be really cool they thought they'd be able to keep in touch um there
were some tears for sure but there was more enthusiasm so
yeah yeah yeah what What about the uh the choice of boat you you you're
talking about monohals the whole time but you ended up with a cat oh yeah big fight you got to do I don't see how you
don't do that but what how did you find the boat i mean and what in the world is
Fuzzywig oh I love it do you want to tell how we found the boat and I'll say how we named it yeah so when we first
when we first chartered a boat after Emil and I were certified all of our all of our training and experience had been
on monoholes up to this point and I just thought you know what there's a lot to consider and maybe a catamaran would be
good for us let's just try it out so we chartered one and we brought three friends three couples of friends that
were with us and we tried it out and at the end of that week I was sold i was like this is so comfortable it's so
stable yeah it's just like it's a it's a floating house monoholes you're you know
there's a lot to say about it they sail better they sail faster but I wasn't looking to get anywhere in a hurry i was
looking to be comfortable and safe with my family and my kids and so I I was sold on catamarans emily was on team
monohole for a long time and I'll I'll let you speak to what Well one of the
things I loved about the monohole is that there was um you when you would go below decks there was a central
gathering place and then everybody's rooms was off from that so you could be in one spot you could kind of check on
every single person whereas on the catamaran I'm going to be on the completely opposite side of the boat
where I can't hear or keep tabs on what's happening in the other hole and I
was really uncomfortable with that idea okay so we we did move what I do love
about the catamaran though after we sailed it was that it was really stable it has a
really shallow draft so you can get nice and snug up close to islands or wherever you want to set your anchor yeah
especially if you're going to be in bad weather and then um they they have all these redundancies
built in you know with double engines and if one side starts sinking the other side will keep floating so anyway there
were a lot of safety considerations as well that as you know you could set your drink on a table and it probably
wouldn't spill and this was a 38footer right yeah 38
what was the brand what was it it was a Lagoon lagoon it was a Lagoon okay yeah yeah so it was lagoon all the way
absolutely yeah it's awesome it the If anybody's looking at a boat one of the things I love about the lagoon is that
the salon or the kitchen area is all up above and so you have a 360 view of the
ocean while you're in there cooking dinner eating meals or whatever instead of being shoved down below yeah and
that's the case for most catamarans yeah yeah and to your question about
Feziwig Fezywig was Scrooge's boss in A Christmas Carol
and Fezywig was when when Scrooge goes back to visit his time with Fezywig he
goes to this fantastic Christmas party where everybody is invited and you know
Fezwig was his boss and they worked hard all year round but they also played and they didn't wait until you know Scrooge
was sort of slowly losing his the love of his life because all he did was work and anyway
Scrooge was sort of the example of all work and no play And Fezziwig was the example of just take breaks play as you
go celebrate life don't wait for it to all come together before you decide to be happy and and and joyful and
[Music] so Fezywig was sort of our way of saying we're just going to enjoy life while
it's happening and we're not going to wait for some some payoff later on that that may never come yeah and then we
were going to have a little blog to go along with it to keep our family up to date and one of the things we noticed
was that if you tried to search Fezy wig you got every single community production of A Christmas Carol come up
ever and so we thought well let's spell it a little bit differently instead of using the I we put in a Y for Yankee
because when you have to say your boat name you spell it out in what is it called like the NATO Fox Trot Echo Zulu
Yankee Whiskey India Golf is how you would spell our name over the radio yeah so we're like we're coming from New York
so we'll put Yankee right in the middle of of our spelling of Fezywig and anyway
we just we loved it yeah the name is near and dear and actually when we sold the boat the
couple that bought it they liked the name so much that they kept it so every now and then we get a report from "Hey I
saw your boat in in Grenada," or "Hey I saw your boat in you know the Bahamas or you know wherever it happens to be,"
because it's still got the same name so you guys are launched out now with your family you're you're you're heading
out on your one-year adventure um what how did it go i mean did you did
you were you were you uh after the first couple of weeks like this was a horrible idea this is or is this the greatest
thing ever already or how are you feeling about this thing and do you already have this planned for a year i
mean it's like this is going to be a year this is what we're going to do uh
but but how does it start out i think we were secretly hoping that we I mean we were maybe ahead of our skill set or how
the world was at the time but we were secretly hoping that we would be able to turn it into multiple years and get some
kind of remote work happening um that's what we
thought going in we were like we're going to go through the Panama Canal we're going to go all around the world we're going to go across the Atlantic
backwards we're going to We just had all kinds of plans and um then we arrived
and that changed our perspective significantly we within a day we felt
like we had made the stupidest decision of our lives because we Eric Right right we we
get to our boat we we'd never actually seen our boat actually we'd only we were buying it in the Caribbean in St martin
and we had had an inspector go down and take a look at it before we purchased it but we'd never actually been there so we
get down there and they were working they had agreed to do a a list of things before we closed on the boat and we got
there and some pretty significant things weren't done there was no main sail on the boat one of the engines was super
clunky and smoky and a few other things and so we just had to kind of wait
around eventually the sail came and that got installed and the engine still wasn't working but we were quickly
realizing that everything in the Caribbean was way more expensive than we thought we were overwhelmed by the
complexity of the things that we wanted to do to the boat to make it liveable we wanted to put in a water maker and solar
and wind so that we'd have a lot of um you know independence to be off-rid and
that was getting really you know I'm not an electrician i'm not a plumber i'm not you know I'm not I'm handy in a lot of
ways but not those ways and so you know and having somebody else do it made it even more expensive and so
we were just feeling snowed under and we were really regretting our decision and
we just thought you know maybe what if what if we just sell the boat back i'll go ask for my job back maybe they'll
just hire me back on we can get on a plane fly back to New York and just sit out the winter in in our apartment
watching movies on Netflix and before we did that we decided to take the boat out one
time just for the fun of it i think the kids really helped here too because they were they were just left at the marina
while we're running back and forth to the Chandler which is the word for shop that sells all things boat and and they
stopped us one day and said you know you told us that we were coming out here to
be together but you guys are never here you know and um it was it was good it's
good to have those truth tellers in your family to kind of say "Whoa whoa what's going on?" And we realized um we don't
have to have everything working perfectly for us to you know still have
our family dinner together or spend time with our kids and so this was sort of a
combination of those things like let's try out the boat one time and let's go do something all of us together as a
family yeah so we picked a little nearby island it was a national park island and
we tossed off the lines navigated out of the harbor and as soon as we hit the
channel everything went sideways uh what we didn't know when we bought the boat was that the entrance to this location
where our boat was housed is considered the most treacherous marina entrance in the entire Caribbean it was a very
protected lagoon but getting out was crazy it made the inside very protected but it was just jagged rocks on both
sides and really turbulent seas going out and so the kids started they were up on deck to help raise the sails and they
went flying up in the air and stuff was crashing down inside and it was just kind of bedum for a few minutes until we
got through the channel and nobody went overboard and nothing meaningful broke
permanently and then we get out there and we raise the sails and now we're bobbing in the wind and everyone starts
to get seasick and it was a one-hour sail Greg and in one hour everyone was miserable we get to this place we try to
drop anchor and it's a it's a fight to try and get the anchor to hold because the kids have apparently forgotten how
to sail and I've forgotten how to be a captain and yeah we we like to call that like the dinner show for everyone else
who's already at anchor so I guess long story short is we we're miserable we
feel like we've made the worst decision and then we get the kids to shore and we just ask them "Hey you know we came out
here to be together and things aren't going really well but is there anything that's going well right now what's is
there anything good?" Yeah and we took stock and they they shared some really poignant small things that were
meaningful and it helped us reset and reenter and we decided that you know we
can we can overcome this we can we can come together as a family and uh they kind of joked that you know it was my
dumb idea to do this whole thing in the first place and tried to pin it on me but we didn't let them get away with that we told them that they had all
agreed to come as well and uh we we stuck it out and I'll be honest I'm jumping ahead a little bit here but we
later on met a family that came out on a boat with two kids and I think they were
out for maybe two three four weeks like they had a boat made for them or
something custom boat build like they had everything everything dialed in and prepared and they got out there and yeah
in those first two days they got sick i I thought it was something related to school like they the Wi-Fi wasn't good
enough and so their kids couldn't keep up with school and so they just threw in the towel after like 3 weeks and went
home and I was like "Wow that could have been us that could have been us." And I'm so grateful that we persevered and
um you know I I'll water ski over some of this but basically we uh we had to
overcome a lot we were we felt pretty inferior at least I did to the task but
we we were humble learners and we asked for help and we found mentors and we found a community and we found people
that would teach us and coach us and encourage us and we our kids found
friends and we found friends other couples and we ended up finding two other families that we were we became
really close with and us and our three boats we would we sailed around together for three months and just and you know
we're still friends to this day you know 10 years later and our kids are in touch
and we've gotten together on multiple occasions and so it just became life-changing on so many levels in terms
of leveling up our skill set leveling up our friendships you know with we had
great friends before in case any in the sense that you know like we just we made new friends and I think we
leveled up as a family in terms of our connection and our and our um our
harmony together and our ability to work together as a team and uh you know we we
covered a lot of distance after those first few weeks in terms of actual islands and countries visited and things
like that i would say our faith too though really I mean for one thing we've we yes we took our whole family away
from the community that we had built and you know been part of but we also were
away from social media and TV and movies
and um we kids were playing musical instruments learning how to bake playing card games making you know creative
crafts and activities going on field trips make movies with the other kids movies they they didn't care about what
was in or what was popular or what other people were watching they weren't trying to fit anything and they just belonged
by pursuing their own interests where they were creating and generating things all the time and it really I
think kind of reset their their minds and what they were looking for in life and and then as far as our our faith you
know we were doing uh home seminary so I was teaching home seminary we had two
teenagers on board and we did home cub
scouts our son was doing all the Cub Scout things um with us and we wanted to
go to church which we did every week uh it would be we would often just like
wear our swimsuits take a 20-minute dinghy ride where we all got soaked go into the closest you know the bar
closest to shore to their bathroom change our clothes into our Sunday
clothes and then walk like what half a mile at least yeah to get to the church
and and um we just like they saw that it took a lot of effort and inconvenience
to go to church and then we would really connect with the people we'd we'd
participate musically we'd go to their their parties their just different
classes and things they were doing we'd teach give talks and participate as any
way we can we I think we went to young women's camp with some of them anyway uh
one of the great opportunities was on the islands in in St martin there was a
need for a sister missionary and we had a daughter who said she'd been wanting to serve since she was 9 years old really consistently she was like I want
to be a missionary i want to be a missionary and they were out of options
and our daughter was 14 at our daughter was 14 and they just called us and like would your daughter like to be a
missionary for a few days and they picked her up at we were at a we were at a swimming pool on shore they
picked her up in her swimsuit took her away to be a missionary she just borrowed clothes until she met us on the
dock the next morning with a little package of clothes she could wear and she went out and had the three or 4 day
mission experience that it was so eye opening and she loved it so much and she later served a mission in Tokyo but they
just and they got to share um the gospel with friends that we met and they're like "Oh you might want to download this
app for the Book of Mormon or you know it it was pretty incredible how many opportunities that we had to share the
gospel mostly with people who missionaries can't talk to because they're not allowed out on the water." And it was it was a great Anyway you
were just talking about different ways that we grew and some people said to us before we left you know what about your
church responsibilities and I think you got to take that seriously and take that to the Lord and see what he says but he
told us to go and then he gave us opportunities everywhere we went to serve and grow in the gospels so that
was awesome for us now were you on the Dutch side then or is that at St martin or is that we bought our boat on the
French side and then we moved it around to the Dutch side to do a lot of the work and to connect with because most of
the live aboard sailors live are on the Dutch side because that's where all the facilities are and so we we were mostly
on the Dutch side as we were kind of getting the boat sorted out yeah i had uh we we were close to first married we
went to St martan or to the Dutch side there and and uh they had one of the
excursions you know they had a uh uh you could grab previous boats that had been
in America's Cup right so but they were all monohos at
the time right i mean that's all there was at the time for that kind of thing in fact I don't think they allowed cats
for a long Oh no no cats are not welcome in the racing community and that's Yeah and and so and so we uh but but it was
the most amazing thing because we crewed it right we went through and we crewed this thing and and and raced other boats
you know that uh that were America's Cup boats it was amazing incredible but uh so anyway that was fun it was something
that you know coolest excursion ever that's a pretty cool experience ever so I want to ask about the kids what did
this do for the kids what did how did this change change the kids because you know you've got a world today where
again you brought up social media and you had the opportunity to be real with them and in in more of a real world just
a human world nature um how do you think this affected them you know even 10
years later was this a positive was it a negative
we I can speak to the downsides first okay okay the downsides is even now they
will see how long they can go after meeting a new person before mentioning
that they ever lived on a sailboat because it's an odd experience it's unconventional um it comes with a lot of
assumptions on the part of the person who hears that you did it and um it kind
of others them makes people feel like they are unrelatable you know and so
they usually like to get to know them and and connect on other levels before it's like oh yeah my yeah my family did
do that and so I have this skill so you know coming back they were like people like this was great for our family but
people who didn't do it have a really hard time wrapping their head around it or understanding
me and so that would I say be probably the main downside for them and the
second one being it was really hard coming back trying to reconnect with friends who were in a consumption
culture and it wasn't as satisfying anymore it just didn't fit the bill and
so it was a little depressing trying to re-enter socially not for every one of our kids but for some of our kids that
was a real downer for a while and yeah and I'll say that that's a culture shock
i mean it's just a a huge culture shock i would say for me too as we as we
realized we were going to be re-entering society i was really dreading it because of social media i was like "Oh no
Facebook." Um because we didn't do social media at all while we were out this was before Instagram and you know
it wasn't like we were we weren't participating we had a blog but then but but that was a lot of work to try and
get some stuff posted because it was just a different time yeah i think I had a Facebook account but I really liked
not being on it but um anyway along the way I read a book about Nelson Mandela
and I realized he gave me the solution was like as long as I'm always coming from a place of love then I'll I'll
always know you know I can I can be okay on social media that was a lesson I learned um on the boat like okay I'm
going back in how do I want to how do I want to present there and it's like always from a place of love then I'll feel okay um but it's there were
tremendous amount of upsides yeah I think the things that you mentioned Emily were the price to pay a small
price to pay for some really huge benefits because our kids first of all
they they were able to really get centered on reality they they were
connecting with the real world in very real ways with real stakes and just I'm
just going to talk about sailing for a second they would be in charge of a watch if we're doing an overnight
crossing they would be on for two hours and the older kids we'd put them on watch by themselves and we we never put
the younger kids on by themselves either myself or Emily would be with them but they were in charge of the boat and when
you are given that kind of responsibility it kind of you rise to
the occasion and they really grew in confidence and they developed a skill
set or a competency that really uh served has served them well and and I
think that they they came home really um resilient
mhm they came home really resilient in the sense that they knew they could do hard things as individuals they knew
that they could do hard things as a family and and that they they were not
afraid of the world they were not afraid of of other cultures or other languages
or other socioeconomic situations and they were not afraid of
uh of travel I guess in a in a way and I would say that all of our kids have been
I'm not going to say they've been nomadic but they've especially the adult ones they've been all over the world on
their own with friends studied abroad programs and and so they are they feel very comfortable in the world you know
traveling and just going for it and and not they don't all necessarily want to
move onto a boat when they're when they have families of their own they might some of them talk about it but really
they are able to have a high level of confidence in what interests them what they want to do
and high level of confidence in their ability to pursue it and if they're willing to persevere and overcome they
know they will succeed they don't expect it to be easy they don't expect it to be
fun always but they know that if they keep at it they will succeed and as a
dad I'm so thrilled that that is how they view the world and how they view themselves and and when that's your
approach it's wide open you can do whatever you want yeah they're solution-minded and one of the daughters
said I I asked her "How have you changed how has this changed you?" And she had turned 17 on the trip and she said "It
didn't change me it made me more myself." And I and I think that was very
wise because we have this continuity of self we are eternal beings but she just
felt like through the intensity both the intensely beautiful intensely amazing
and making um really good friends really fast think you know trying snorkeling
all those kind of things alongside making it through storms or really boring long sails or missing your
friends or whatever all those things she said that really helped her come to know herself better more quickly you just
went through so many new experiences in rapid succession that how could you not like get to know yourself better and I
thought that was really great and I was so grateful that you know I think it was like the next year she she was applying
for colleges and headed out and to have a kid a young woman who knows herself so
well um heading out into the world was a real feel good for me i think my real quick
Yeah go ahead i was going to say our our daughter when she was applying for college her her essay started out it's
3:00 a.m and our boat is sinking and and then she proceeds to tell this whole
saga about how we we came really close to losing our boat they always want to
know how you handle a challenge right how did you overcome a challenge so yeah no that's a good essay that's a unique
one they're not going to get that one very often yeah okay so what did you guys mostly stay in the Caribbean going
up the eastern seabboard where where were you for this year yeah we Yeah the distance was what 2500
miles yeah we started in St martin we sailed down the Caribbean chain a little ways then we circled back and then we
cut up through the Virgin Islands through the Virgin Islands over to Puerto Rico along the north coast of the
Dominican Republic up to the Bahamas through the Bahamas over to Fort Lauderdale and then we worked our way
all the way up the east coast up to Manhattan and we actually parked the
boat in a marina that was built while we'd been gone which was about five blocks from our house and we arrived at
1:00 in the morning we tied the boat off to the dock to a very
surprised security guard security security guard uh and then we just we walked home it was what what is that
like you for all of you i mean that is so surreal after a year coming into the
dock and grabbing your stuff off the boat and it's just it it was such a
beautiful end and there there's some plot twists in there and if anybody wants to read our book I'm glossing over
some really noty stuff i'm not going to spoil it for you but we showed up at 1:00 in the
morning for a reason and not one of our choosing um but yeah this poor confused
security guard I just said "Look hey I've already spoken to the owner of the marina he knows we're here i'll be back at 9:00 in the morning." And we just
took little backpacks you know we left most of our stuff on the boat and we just walked home and I'm really glad
because the the original plan was that all of our friends and neighbors were going to be at the dock and they were gonna kind of like cheer us on and
welcome us home and take a tour of the boat in the end none of them ever even ever even saw our boat because we left
the next morning to turn it over to another family that was renting it from us but walking home all of us kind of
bundled up in now fall weather through our neighborhood quiet
you know it's never too quiet in New York but it was pretty quiet this time of night and it was just a very gentle
peaceful finish and then to get to our home and unlock the door like we've done thousands of times before and step in
and just to connect the dots in our brains and in our bodies to have having left that place a year prior gone on
this whole journey and then walked back through that same door i think is it TS Elliott
that says that um or come back to the same place and know it for the first time to travel is to come back is to go
away and to come back to the same place again and know it again for the first time we walked in the same
door where we've been living since 1999 and but we are totally different
people and so that that was there there's a lot of learning that had to
happen after the trip but it was it was a really beautiful finish i think it reintroduced us to our community as well
because we had been living there like Eric said for a really long time but we
lived in a Caribbean community it's a 95% Dominican where we live in New York City is largely Dominican and Puerto
Rican in New York City it's they're all coming from these like Caribbean cultures and now that we had been to
their homes you know their culture and been guested there we understood our
neighbors so much better we understood why things ran the way they did why they sat out on park benches in the sun all
the time because it just feels like you can never get enough sunshine after you know you grew up drenched in sunshine
and um so yeah I think we were different and we we related to our community in a
different way and I had friends say to me that I seemed different that I seemed
like I had opened up after that trip so did you guys ever face any any bad
weather never no there's no bad weather in the Caribbean i don't think we hit any storms or any rain no we had we
tried to avoid it but we were not always successful no we Yeah I mean if you want
to hear a storm story I can tell you a storm story but yeah there was there were lots of storms we you know we kind
of kept our eye on hurricanes and made sure that we were well out of their path and and we had to sit out on the
sidelines to let some things blow by but yeah that you know but the here's the thing Greg is that we we started out
timid and we didn't always know what to do in those scary situations but we we
survived each one and each one made us more skilled and more confident and by the end we we never sought out bad
weather but but man we were good at writing it out if we had to it's all beta i the first the first one though
was really scary and it was we were the the first one we were making a crossing
from St martin to um the British Virgin Islands it was supposed to be really good weather it was our first crossing
it was our first night crossing um we were leaving a group of friends that we had been with for 3 months and so we
were really kind of out on our own now and this storm just kicked up and it was
such a surprise and we didn't really know what to do about it so um Eric you
know we were supposed to take night watches and share the shifts but Eric and our daughter Allison were on the first shift when this storm kicked up
and they you know he wasn't willing to put anybody else on deck in those conditions and so he just stayed up all
night long and turned the boat into the wind to take pressure off the sails so that we they wouldn't tear we wouldn't
lose something um it was scary but we survived we figured it out um
another boat lost its mast in that same storm a bigger boat than us but this was one of the times when I I knew for sure
that God had wanted our family to take this trip he kept getting little post-it notes on my heart this is good this is
good this is good and I would just say "Hey you know you sent us out here will
you protect us and if not bring us home." You know whatever whatever it might be but on this occasion we we
realized after the fact that God had already put a miracle in place for us because with a expectation of perfect
weather all night long Eric had tied something that's called a pretor that just means maybe you want to explain it
you'll say it better than I do yeah so the boom is that sort of metal bar that swings left to right i know and I know
you know this Greg but the boom is that big metal bar that swings left to right at the base of the sail and if the wind
changes direction from behind the boat it can throw it over pretty powerfully from one side to the other and that's
you know the phrase lowering the boom that's where you that's where you can get a concussion you can you can twist
your mast and and and rip it off there's all kinds of bad things that can happen and so a pretor is just a line that you
know if you set the boom on one side while you're sailing and a pretor is just a line that goes from the boom down
to a deck cleat to hold it in place so that if the wind does catch it it does not throw over and I kind of on a whim
you could call it a whim tied a pretor and and the storm blew in the wind shifted
our our sail our boom could have gone get gotten thrown over it could have resulted in injury it could have
resulted in damage to the boat and none of those things happened yeah and so it was after the fact we realized you know
the miracle had already been put in place and we were really grateful but moving forward we got really good at
lowering the sales from the cockpit and we just handled storms better we weren't afraid of them
that's true what What What is How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did this guys this cost you oh yeah oh this
is a good question i felt I think I include these numbers in our book but we bought our boat for 150,000 um we got a
loan for it and I think all in the whole trip cost us around $30,000 because
that's amazing so you're you're looking at what's that $2500 a month mhm you're
living on it was cheaper than living at home even though cab fairs were expensive upfront and repairs and water
maker once we subtract after we sold the boat and subtracted that out
um you know and we rented out our apartment we even rented out our minivan while we were gone before Toro and um
yeah it came out to be our our least expensive year of family life
that's amazing that's amazing so lastly then let's look at what what would you say are the things that you learned the
most you've talked about a couple things about the family and faith and you know what what you're different people what
did you learn about yourself what what did you learn about this what what came out of it why do you think the Lord
wanted you to do this some of those reasons I think are still unfolding and we are seeing it in our
kids' lives and in their families as they you know come up with their own designs you know in companionship with
the Lord um it increased my personal faith for me one of the things that we
took away from it is a a phrase that we like to use um that it will emerge as we went from
island to island to island every single time it was a place that we hadn't been we didn't know where anything was but as
we would get closer you know the outline of the island would appear you could start to see the palm trees we would see
where we were going to anchor we would go on shore and see they had laundry and food and a bank or like whatever we
needed and every single time it always worked out even though we didn't have hardly any information going in so it
made me feel more confident just starting out without having all of the
answers up front because I'm someone who like prior to that I like to have all the answers up front and now I really
believe that the solutions come up right alongside the problems and you just got to keep I just need to keep moving
forward and that that was a real shift in just my basic way of operating in
life so that was a huge one for me for me I would say that there are two things
one is I ended up getting my old job back i came back from the boat and I
went into work for the first time and these were all people that had I'd worked with for years
and one guy said to me he said "You look leaner."
And yes I had lost 20 pounds just by living on the boat so I was physically
leaner but I think I had shed a lot of burdens you know burdens of I don't
know if you'd say societal expectation or just realizing how little you really need to survive and be happy and so I
felt like I'd kind of decluttered my life in some ways and so I do feel like
I came back leaner and also I came back
calmer for the same reasons that Emily is talking about when your daily weekly
rhythm is going into the new steadily regularly constantly you develop the
habit of figuring things out and once you've done that 10 20 100 times you
realize oh you know what i'm gonna keep figuring things out and it's gonna be okay and there might be new things that
come my way things that I haven't figured out before but I keep figuring
them out and once you realize that you can just figure things out you're able
to just sort of rest in the fact that you're capable and you're not going to
get overwhelmed and you're not going to be you're not going to drown you're just going to find a way to solve the problem
one step at a time one problem at a time and then the next thing will be there and you'll figure that out too and every
single one of us everybody listening right now you and me we've figured out everything in our lives up till now we
are exactly where we are because we've figured it out and once you realize that you are a figuring out machine and you
and that's just going to be how life goes you don't have to worry about what problems are going to spring up because
you know you'll figure it out and once I realized that about myself once you know
to Emily's point as things emerge you're able to find the solutions I think you can relax because
you just know that it's going to be okay okay and now you guys are doing
something very similar to what Well what you were doing right
yeah we can so in the years following the boat we we ended up traveling quite a bit in a nomatically as a family just
in this sort of fearless creative inexpensive slow travel way and we loved
it until CO stopped us and then you know everyone was saying the word uncertainty like if the whole world was a world
bubble during CO it was like uncertainty was one of the biggest words and we were like oh that's like our lifestyle is
just dealing with uncertainty so we started a coaching program to help with that and then we um our our coaching
framework is all sailing related and we started in 2020 taking people sailing as a
commercial business and um we so we've been doing that since then and uh these
trips you know you can hire a charter captain anywhere and say we want to get a charter captain and maybe a chef and
and take us out wherever we want to see these islands and um our experience is a
little is a little different than just that because we have this growth mindset and so we want to bring people on who
want to learn who want to be hands-on who want to know like what is it really like living on a sailboat let me try
this out how do how do you get provisions how do you store them how do you cook in one of these kitchens how do
you get an anchor how do you get a moing ball how to raise and lower the sails why are you making these decisions Captain Eric and um show me where that
switch is or how anyway so ours are all specifically for people who are sailing
curious who think they might want to live on a boat have that as part of their retirement maybe or want to do
something like that with a family to bond them and and so it's pretty unique of an offering out there this past
weekend we were talking to a couple different charter captains and they were like "Oh yeah our our sailing trips are
mostly focused around what time people wake up after having been drinking all night the night before and then which
bars they want to go to that day you know and we're like "Yeah that we felt that when we entered the sailing world."
Um but this is a completely different like our people just come sailing with
us anywhere in the world we charter the boat and they get to come on as our crew and by the end of the week they can run
the boat you know Eric teaches them enough sailing that they can do that and they also get to snorkel and hike and
everyone's hands-on and so you know I I try and have our our the people that join us first of all I'll say we go out
for a week at a time in different destinations all over the world Caribbean Bahamas Mexico Mediterranean
Asia we'll go for a week at a time and whenever you come on my goal is to have
you doing as much hands-on sailing work as you want to do i don't need any more
practice steering the boat or putting the sails up and down and so my goal is to just coach people through the process
be right by their side to make sure that they know what they're doing that they succeed that they have fun that everyone's safe and that and and by the
end of the week everyone's kind of humming along you know it's a good good chemistry between the group and everyone
knows where everything is on the boat how it works and there's a it's fun to watch people's eyes sparkle a little bit
when they realize that they're that they're that they're making it happen and and that if they want to they can
continue to grow in this way it can just be a vacation or it can also be a doorway to a new life
yeah awesome yeah it's true all right well the book is Seven at Sea you see it
here by Eric and Emily Orton we'll put the link to that in the description we'll also put the link to your website
in there as well again I'm jealous i love hearing about this and and and maybe someday we can get you out on one
of our sailing trips it' be fun to love or we'll see you and your wife out there on on your boat or be anchored next to
each other you just tell us where you're going to be and we'll come visit you we'll join you yeah sounds good all right guys love it thanks so much yep
take care thanks for having us thank you