My Boobs Crossed the Atlantic Before I did

This story is a bit of a departure from my usual newsletter type ramblings. I’m bobbing around in the Atlantic and have a lot of time on my hands to write. At some point I may write a book, and so this post is a more anecdotal flavor than the usual meat and gravy I serve up. If you don’t have time for all of my nonsense, then please go ahead and skip. But just in case you’re curious, this story is true, and still breaks me out in a sweat just thinking about it. If you do feel like humoring me even further, I would love some feedback…

Living full time on a sixty foot trawler with just your husband can drain the romance right out of a marriage. Yes, yes, I know. We have all seen the Instagram couples: Beautiful bronzed demi-god types who look barely old enough to rent a car, let alone own a yacht, grinning adoringly at one another whilst hoisting sails in coordinated swimwear completely unsuitable for sweating, oil changes or performing the advanced yoga positions required to crawl around an engine compartment.

The women always seem to be draped elegantly across the bow holding a wine glass at sunset after having clearly spent hours on…well probably not much really. The man will saunter over and run his hands through her perfect saltwater curls. They both have the sexy and relaxed confidence of people who have apparently never had to scrub barnacles off a hull to discover thousands of tiny marine life in their swim attire. (I call these critters sea crabs and they are itchy and hard to get rid of).

Real boat life is just less erotic than yacht fantasies. In fact living aboard a boat full time involves a lot of trying to remember why you fell in love with a man who convinced you this would be “an incredible adventure” while the two of you grimly solve for how to get the dog to use the fake potty mat, pulling up a stuck anchor in sheets of rain, or hunting down mystery smells emanating from the toilet…Except on boats they insist on calling toilets “heads,” as in: “Heads up, the head’s broken again. Head down to the machine room to find a bucket.” Now don’t get me wrong, over the last six months we have visited ten different countries and we have been privileged enough to enjoy some truly unique experiences. And at some point we even upgraded ourselves from “island cruisers” to “serious ocean passage makers”. We are currently in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean somewhere between Bermuda and the Azores trying our best not to become disaster headlines in the Ocean Cruiser’s Bugle.

It had been my husband’s lifelong dream, ever since he was a young man in the Navy, to cross the Atlantic on his own boat. His father and stepmother lived full time aboard a boat for eighteen years, so apparently this sort of thing is in his DNA. And me? Well, this London born landlubber just liked the idea of a challenge and the excitement of it all: Yes! Let’s fuel up and sail for 12 days and 2,000 miles just the two of us (and the dog). How romantic and exotic! When can we leave?

However, the reality is far from either of those things: Crossing the Atlantic with your husband is less “in sickness and in health” and more: “in twelve-foot seas, sleep deprivation, and while taking turns checking radar alarms at three in the morning.” There are only two of us out here. Two people responsible for keeping the boat moving, not bumping into other ocean going things, trying to avoid the dog crapping on the carpet, and keeping each other alive. We work around the clock in shifts - I wake up as he goes on watch. We meet for quickie microwaved meal rendezvous while clinging to our plates so the food doesn’t decorate our laps. We are no longer just husband and wife. We are crew. And this is not sexy.

Before boat life, our marriage felt pretty balanced. Ken was a helicopter test pilot. I owned a real estate brokerage. He was technical and methodical; I was communicative and creative. We were partners. Equals. I was the funny, mercurial one. He laughed at my jokes and regulated my runaway personality. Then we sold everything, moved aboard our trawler and things changed.

Here is the thing about serious boating; there can only be one Captain. You can argue this philosophically all you want, right up until you are eight hundred miles from land in building seas and somebody has to make an actual decision about weather routing. Suddenly safety trumps equality. And unfortunately for me, my husband has thirty years of military command experience, while I am essentially an entrepreneur whose qualifications include selling horse properties, making people laugh and giving birth to two fine human beings. I’m also excellent at growing orchids and staging open houses, none of these things have proven especially useful while being tossed around the Atlantic in 30 knot winds. So yes. The Captain position was filled, and not by me.

This adjustment has been difficult for me because I do not enjoy being told what to do. Not one bit. One of the main reasons I opened my own brokerage was specifically to avoid having a boss (and also the fact that I am clearly unemployable). This makes the job of my Husband/Captain all the more challenging in walking the fine line between “capable military leader” and “annoying man reminding me for the seventh time to secure a hatch properly”. So now here we are, in the middle of the Atlantic, exhausted, slightly chilly, surviving on caffeine and chocolate, unable to remember when we last showered, brushed our teeth, or laughed and spoke softly to each other. I decided the marriage needed a little sparkle. A reminder that underneath the foul weather gear, damp socks, and caffeine jitters, I am still the intelligent and vaguely sensual woman my husband had once pursued voluntarily.

Now, our boat is bristling with technology. We have navigation systems, weather routing software, Starlink, radar overlays, tracking systems - enough equipment to invade, or at least avoid, a small country. We monitor these systems like our lives depended on it because…well, they do. One of these apps allows us to upload photographs.

And this, unfortunately, is where confidence exceeded technical ability.

I decided it would be sexy to upload a saucy topless photo of myself so that the next time Ken checked the weather tracking app — whoop! — there I would be, floating seductively somewhere between us and the Azores. What I failed to understand was that I had not uploaded the photograph privately to my husband. I had uploaded it to the public boat tracking page we share with Ken’s former Navy colleagues, family, friends, anyone who is a Crew Member on this site, and presumably several confused maritime enthusiasts monitoring Atlantic crossings from Germany.

I discovered this when a friend messaged me: “I don’t know how to tell you this Kirsten… but your boobs appear to be crossing the Atlantic in front of the boat.”

What followed next was twenty solid minutes of blind sweaty panic as I wrestled with satellite internet trying to remove my topless body from the North Atlantic shipping lanes, while our loved ones and colleagues presumably gathered around their devices thinking, “Well… Kirsten seems to be coping surprisingly well with the crossing.”

And strangely enough, that ridiculous moment probably brought us closer than the photograph ever would have. Because after weeks at sea, exhausted and slightly feral, laughter turned out to be infinitely more sexy than a pair of slightly grubby boobs.

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