Sailing Part 1: A Mediterranean Match
Finding a sailboat and our first week at sea
Note from Megan: Hello from terra firma in Barbados! This travel diary is the first in a four-part series about our two-month, 6,000+ NM sail from Kotor Bay, Montenegro all the way to the Caribbean!
This chapter covers the start of our trip, from the process of looking for a sailboat to our first week at sea. We’ll be publishing a new chapter each week, so if you haven’t already, subscribe now so you don’t miss anything!
Have you ever dreamed of crossing an ocean by sailboat? Imagine the scene: salt in your hair, dolphins and flying fish jumping alongside, placid days spent living on the water. For many people, it’s the ultimate bucket-list adventure.
Well, I was not one of those people. I watched with admiration when Greta Thunberg did her famous double transatlantic in 2019, but I never gave much thought to sailing beyond that — until I met Polo. For as long as I’ve known him, Polo has been gripped by the idea of crossing the Atlantic by sailboat. When planning The Green Journey, we used to have conversations that went something like this:
Megan and Polo are watching a beautiful sunset in California
Polo: Wow, this sunset is so great! But I can’t wait to watch the sun set over the ocean when we’re hitchhiking across the Atlantic, it’ll be even better!
Megan: …. umm, we’re hitchhiking across the Atlantic?
Polo: Yeah! When we set off on our low-carbon world tour.
Megan: OK, cool, I guess I’m game. But don’t we need to have years and years of sailing experience before we do that?
Polo: Don’t worry about that! People are always looking for crew.
These conversations always left me a little skeptical and secretly planning an overland route from Europe to Asia as backup. But Polo had a few tricks up his sleeve. He’d been thoroughly inspired by his badass, brave, inspiring older sister Sarah, who had crewed a transatlantic crossing with a similar experience level in 2019. She gave us guidance on how to find a volunteer position for the East-to-West milk run.
Every year, hundreds of professional and recreational boats make the passage from Europe to the Caribbean via the easterlies, the permanent prevailing winds that flow along the equator. It’s widely said this is the easiest ocean crossing in the world — hence the nickname.
While many of these boats are crewed by professional deckhands / friends of captains / YouTube famous families, there’s always some demand for extra labor. See, similar to backpacking, sailing has fun parts: navigation, sunbathing, eating fresh fish, chatting, lounging, reading. It also has not-so-fun parts: doing dishes, swabbing the deck, bilging the engine.
The idea behind sail-hitchhiking is to volunteer your services aboard a crossing boat. In exchange for passage, lodging, and meals, you take on some of the less desirable jobs and grueling night watches. Crew does the annoying stuff; the captain does the important stuff, like getting you across the ocean safely.
That’s what we set out to do, and despite my initial skepticism, I have to hand it to Polo: it totally worked!
So how do you find a sailboat to cross the Atlantic?
So how do two people with NO overnight sailing experience, limited credentials, and (on my part) NO distinctive enthusiasm find a boat to cross the Atlantic ocean?
Answer: the Internet, of course!
Before the invention of Facebook, boat-hitchhiking was a harbor thing. You would go to a marina wearing a big smile (and maybe carrying a few baked goods) and ask if anyone was going out for a day sail. You’d steadily gain experience, network, and eventually, with elbow grease and luck, you’d find a captain willing to take you on board.
But nowadays, Facebook groups and websites are the main marketplace for finding boats. Of course, you still do have marina-strollers (more on that in Part II), but Polo and I put in a LOT of work to find passage online.
All in all, it took about six weeks of posting, searching, and phone-dating with potential captains until we finally found what seemed like the dream setup: professional captain couple Chris* and Maria* were delivering two boats from Montenegro to the British Virgin Islands.
The boats were less than a year old, having spent a season sailing charter cruises in the Mediterranean and were now on their way to the Caribbean. They’d be sailing side-by-side for the entire passage, for safety in numbers, and meeting up at ports. There was just one catch: would we be interested in sailing separately, on a girl’s boat and a guy’s boat?
At this point, Polo and I had spent six months in each other’s constant company, sharing small spaces and navigating all the unglamorous parts of long-term travel: camping in bad weather, eating lots of ramen, and unpredictable access to showers. We were also running out of things to talk about.
So yes, we were game!
Rushing back to the Balkans
One small problem: when Chris and Maria offered us passage, we were all the way back in France — more than 1,500 miles away from the point of departure.
We had just a few days to rush all the way down to Kotor, a beautiful city set on a winding bay of the Adriatic Sea where we’d cycled earlier in the summer. And because we aren’t taking any planes, we had to put together a mishmash of busses, trains, and sleeper voyages to make it on time!
Although the journey to Kotor was fast-paced and a bit stressful, it ended up being a great way to say a last goodbye to friends and family in Europe. First, we stopped by Paris to quickly celebrate the departure with college friends! From there, we started a marathon Flixbus journey to Belgrade, with an overnight stop in Budapest! We visited the famous Széchenyi Thermal Baths, and only half-joked that it would be our last wash for a while.
In Belgrade, we spent time with David, a friend of Polo’s from school, before taking a crazy night train all the way to Montenegro. The night train, the 2nd of our green adventure, was an incredible experience. We adore falling asleep in one place and waking up in a whole new country. This train in particular, was a total travel hack. For less than $25, we were carried 300 miles to the Adriatic, across 254 tunnels and 435 bridges, in cozy couchettes!
And just like that, our land-based European adventures were at an end.
The first week at sea
Once we arrived in Kotor, we were quickly handed our first tasks of the voyage: provisioning and engine bilging! First, we went shopping with Lauren and Laurien, another adventurous crew couple traveling the world by tandem bike. Chris and Maria sent us to the store with a long list and warned us not to forget a single item: after all, you can’t run back to the grocery store when you’re at sea!
After provisioning, it was time to swab the decks, bilge the engines, and check the sails. We were scheduled to leave the next day, so we needed to make quick work of the tasks at hand.
While completing our tasks, we got to know the other members of our crew. In addition to Lauren and Laurien, we were setting sail with Naama on the girl’s boat, and Oli on the guy’s boat. Like us, Lauren and Laurien were pretty much landlubbers, but both Naama and Oli had come from recent stints working on boats, so we had a healthy mix of experience levels on board. And of course, for Chris and Maria, this was just the next passage in a series of transatlantic deliveries they’d done over the years.
Departing Kotor Bay was an iconic, peaceful moment. Our hearts filled with excitement and joy as we starting sailing, and we waved at each other from across the boats. I felt like hey, maybe this sailing is going to be amazing, and my head quickly filled with fantasies of buying a little boat to continue on the next chapters of The Green Journey.
And then, we hit open water, and the boats started to shake and shudder. This was way more intense than anything we’d felt aboard little dinghies back in California! Aboard the catamaran, I was able to make a quick pot of pasta and sleep off the dizziness, and I woke at 10 PM for my first night watch feeling refreshed and ready to work.
Unfortunately, Polo could not say the same. The boy’s boat was a 39-foot monohull, which means it was far more vulnerable to moving and shaking in the rocky seas. He was also supposed to be sharing a cabin in the bow (front of the boat) which is the worst place to be during bad weather. As soon we left the bay and headed into the sea, Polo started to feel a queasiness in his stomach.
One of the first pieces of advice Polo’s sister Sarah gave us had been to always have something in one’s stomach to avoid seasickness. With that in mind, Polo quickly swallowed a whole pizza. Only twenty minutes later, he fed the whole thing to the fish. He spent his first night ever at sea sleeping in agony outside the cockpit, wearing foul-weather gear and a lifejacket instead of a blanket.
Luckily, in the morning, the seas had calmed considerably and we were able to enjoy some of the magic of life at sea: dolphins swimming alongside the boat, beautiful sunsets, and good company.
A stormy trip to Sardinia
The captains had a tight sail plan: make it from Montenegro to Gibraltar in two weeks, with a short stopover in Sicily. Once in Gibraltar, we’d chill for a few days, re-provision the boats, and set off into the Atlantic Ocean, making it to the Caribbean well before Christmas!
Here’s what actually happened: it took us more than a month to cross the Mediterranean alone, with several unplanned stopovers across Italy and Spain. First lesson of sailing: nothing goes according to plan. Second lesson: mother nature designs the itinerary for you.
We barely made it 36 hours at sea before Captain Chris made the call we should head into Crotone, a little port city in Calabria, Southern Italy. There, we would be blocked for two days by 25-knot winds and fierce storms, before the weather window was decent enough to resume our direction towards Sicily.
We had less than twelve hours until the wind changed again, forcing us to divert to spend a day in Lipari, a beautiful little island in a chain of volcanic formations in the Tyrrhenian Sea. It was here in Lipari where I realized my favorite part of sailing was definitely going to be making landfall. In Lipari, we ate veggie pizza and scrubbed the bottom of the boat clear of barnacles, before setting sail at night to hustle towards Sardinia. Captain Maria had been checking the weather and a big storm (the one that would be later known as Superstorm Ciarán) was on its way. We needed to make it to Sardinia before it caught us at sea.
Even though the worst of the weather patterns had yet to arrive, the sail from Lipari to Sardinia was one of the biggest challenges of our lives.
The catamaran and monohull both tossed and turned as winds blew up to 40 knots at their highest. Waves of 3-4 meters (10-12 feet, for my American friends) consistently battered the boats — I stayed relatively dry perched on the 2nd story of the catamaran, but Polo was soaked to the bone during his watches. We wore lifejackets 24/7 and tethered them to jacklines to stay safe. Polo didn’t sleep much at all with the constant rocking, and despite taking seasickness tablets religiously, couldn’t keep down much more than bread and plain pasta.
48 hours later, on almost no sleep, we pulled into Sardinia just past three in the morning. We’d spent less than a week of time at sea, and we’d already battled two crazy storms. It was a humbling experience, to say the least, but one we were extremely grateful to have because it put into context the enormity of the adventure we were on and heightened our attention to safety for the remainder of the voyage.
All in all, during our first week of sailing, we made it just over 700 miles. We were stuck in Sardinia for a week after arrival, waiting for another weather window. Then, it was on to the next stop….
A closing note on privilege
Before we move on to the next chapter of this sailing saga, I want to take a minute to acknowledge the extreme privilege that Polo and I had in being able to do this voyage. This trip would not have been possible without a long list of advantages that we were born with: ability privilege, passport privilege, the privilege of having healthy & happy families who do not rely on us for financial support. I mention this because while I might sound cavalier about the trip at times in the writing, we recognize that this was a great adventure, undertaken with caution and enabled by privilege that not everyone has.
The goal of The Green Journey is to discover and share climate solutions from around the world. Hitchhiking a sailboat to discover these solutions is part of our personal journey, but we recognize it isn’t feasible or desirable for everyone. Our hope in sharing our story is to show that this type of thing can be possible, and perhaps even inspire someone else to try the same, as Sarah did for us years ago — while also talking candidly about the parts that were really, really tough.
I’ll write more in future chapters on our feelings about sailing as a low-carbon form of transportation and on our hopes to improve visibility and accessibility in the sailing world.
*names changed for privacy
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Gnarly, love it