Sea Stories on my Sleeve

This article was written for Lighter Living, the official blog of Omni, an on-demand storage, concierge service company.

For three years, I called a 43-foot sailboat home. I was one of five crewmembers on an around-the-world sailing voyage. Sailing is the ultimate test of self-reliance, and shipboard life is a lesson in living with and living without.

I shared confined quarters with my four crewmembers—living with constant companionship and without the luxury of privacy. Together, we lived with the constant uncertainty of weather, unexpected equipment failures, and even the threat of piracy. Far away from ship chandleries or hardware stores, we jury-rigged repairs. We lived without easy access to communication—no on-board Internet, satellite email that cost $0.01 per character, and a satellite telephone at a hefty rate of $1.50 per minute. We lived without an unlimited supply of fresh water, showering and washing dishes with salt water siphoned from the sea. Without the convenience of grocery stores, we carefully rationed our food supplies, treating coffee, soda, potato chips, and candy as delicacies.

I lived without an expansive trove of personal belongings. All of my possessions fit into one duffle bag and a carry on with a laptop, camera, and journal. I stowed my clothing, precision-folded, in my one assigned shelf above my berth. My essential wardrobe was my foul weather gear and bikinis for the equatorial climes where we sailed. Patagonia gear was the unofficial crew uniform, and we knew one other’s wardrobes by heart. True to its claims, the gear withstood the wear and tear of our daily crew duties, and our photo archive includes many a Patagonia-catalog-worthy shot. My clothing was about basic survival and had nothing to do with style.

My nice clothes were those without the occupational hazards of diesel or oil stains. To protect these from mildew and inevitable leaks, I preserved each piece in individual Ziploc® bags and dubbed them The Ziploc® Collection. By no means did they meet the landlubber standard of nice: a Pataloha shirt, denim mini skirt, a pair of khaki chinos. The Ziploc® Collection was reserved for crew dinners to celebrate successful offshore passages, well-earned fresh water showers, crew birthdays, and guests who came to visit us in port.  

Along the way, I collected souvenir clothing to remind me of my adventures in foreign ports. A fisherman’s sarong from the Maldives. Shirts from a Balinese seamstress. A kurta from Singapore’s Little India. A Polynesian sundress from Tahiti. Skirts tailor-made with African waxprint fabrics from the market in Dakar. A vintage Australian Navy shirt from the Army Surplus Store in Cairns. All of these became additions to The Ziploc Collection.

Most all of my Patagonia gear survived my 30,000-nm voyage and the intervening years since my return. This gear reminds me of my onetime life at sea: night watches during rough passages, sewing a tear in the jib in the Red Sea, an ocean swim in the waters above the Mariana Trench, our transit through the Suez Canal during a sandstorm.

Souvenir comes from the French for “to remember, come to mind”. My voyage wardrobe is a ready remembrance of my travels and a stalwart keeper of my memories. When I wear pieces from this collection, I literally wear my sea stories on my sleeve. These articles of clothing become conversation starters that give me the opportunity to remember my circumnavigation, which shall forever be a high point of my life. My voyage wardrobe reminds of me not only of foreign ports, but also of the lightness of a minimalist life, without materialistic want, and with gratitude for the basic necessities of life.