Bob and Kim Stephens craved adventure. The pandemic was a rough time for the couple. Working in healthcare during such a challenging time led to major burnout for them both, so when adventure came calling in the form of a sailboat named Meraviglia, they answered.
Giving up their life in Seguin, the duo set sail on the high seas for a life of travel. But sailing a boat is no easy feat and requires expertise and careful management to maintain.
“So we are on board Meraviglia,” Bob said. “It’s a boat we purchased in June of 2022, when we had committed to doing this. She’s a forty-seven-foot-long sailboat. She’s old. She was built in 1985, and she had not been especially well-cared for, so she took a lot of refitting and love to get her to where we were actually able to leave port. That’s not what we had expected. We ended up having to do a lot of work before we were able to leave, but we managed to power through all that, and so now we live aboard, and we have grown to love her.”
Of course, owning the boat is only half the battle. Sailing is physically strenuous and requires special training and practice before setting sail across the open ocean, so the Stephens didn’t want to wait until retirement, when the opportunity was right in front of them.
“I think we also knew with sailing in particular, you need to have the physical ability to do it,” Kim added. “There are a lot of people who wait until they retire and then, unfortunately, their physical health doesn’t allow them to sail for very long. So we knew if we wanted to try this lifestyle, that it was better to do it while we had the ability.”
That ability has led to a life at sea that is very different from life on land. Whereas on land you can just run to the store when you need something, things are not that simple on water, and careful planning is a must. Rather than hopping in the car and running to HEB, Bob and Kim must row ashore in their dinghy, walk to the store, and purchase their groceries before rowing back to their ship and storing their goods in a small on-board refrigerator that is more akin to a college dorm fridge than a full-sized appliance.
“So, you know, grocery shopping and provisioning is definitely very different than land life,” Kim said. “There’s not a lot of storage on a boat. You have to be very creative with your storage of items and your meal prepping. You know, doing laundry is very different. We actually have a small, probably comparable to an apartment washer on our boat. But because we have to make all the water we use, we don’t like to use the washer because it uses a lot of water. So we do hand washing of our laundry, which, again, is very different than your home life where you can throw it in your washer and dryer and forget about it. So that looks really different. Typical day, I would say, if we’re at anchor, you know, we get up in the morning, we have our breakfast. It involves checking the weather, whether you’re at anchor, whether you’re on passage, we’re checking the weather multiple times a day to make decisions about where we need to be.”
Checking the weather and cooking warm meals to keep morale up are just two of the daily tasks done while living at sea. Maintenance becomes an ongoing part of life, with parts frequently going in and out of service.
“I will add to yours that there is always something to fix –– always,” Bob said. “The combination of a lot of different systems, plus the saltwater environment, means something’s always breaking. So a lot of repair work. And I think then when we’re underway, I mean, we’ve done some fairly long passages, including a 33-day trip across the South Pacific. That was our longest passage, but we’ve done numerous passages that were like five to eight or nine days. And on that, we’re of course, not both sleeping at the same time, because someone’s always on watch in the cockpit. So we trade off shifts. We still do laundry every day. And you know, and still watch the weather, of course, because we’re out there on the open ocean. And it’s just a question of, you know, what is the wind doing? Do we need to change our heading or change our sails because of what the wind is doing? We do deck checks every day, making sure that lines haven’t chafed through, and that sails aren’t damaged, and other things are still tied down the way they’re supposed to be. The things that are secured on deck are still secure, etc. But yeah, I think the biggest thing can be the lack of sleep —obviously, can be challenging. And if you’re doing it while the weather isn’t very good, then it’s even more difficult to sleep while you’re underway. So you have to be very careful not to get overtired.”
While Bob and Kim each handle their individual responsibilities on the boat, they come together to man the cockpit and navigate on long trips. Using technology like Starlink and autopilot make old-school sailing a modern feat, and the couple said their longest passage was easier than expected..
“I think at the end, overall, I think our takeaway was it really didn’t seem that hard,” Bob said. “Now, part of that was because we were blessed or cursed, you might say, with extremely light winds for the entire passage, which is why a passage that will often take 24, 25 days to 33 is because we just didn’t have very much wind. So it meant it was less strenuous, less hard work. But after about two or three days, we find we get in the groove and you’re doing your watches, and we don’t mind the passages actually very much. I think, you know, it’s quite a feeling to be out in the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight. You can go for days without seeing any other vessels. It’s just you on the boat, in the water. But it’s it’s very cool. It’s an amazing experience I have to say.”
As Bob said, there were challenges with the crossing, but there was beauty, too.
“It really was a beautiful passage,” Kim added. “It is an incredible thing to be out there and to have dolphins coming alongside the boat or seeing pilot whales in the water and just being in the middle of the ocean. You do need to be self-sufficient and make sure that you have the things you need to fix things when they break because they inevitably do. We actually had a situation where our sail fell down in the middle of a morning watch, and it required Bob to go up the mast in the middle of the ocean, which is never something you really want to have to do. So, you know, you have to be able to rely on each other when there’s only two of you to get these things accomplished and done and fixed, and, you know, I think we have worked out a really good partnership on things boat.”
And in addition to beauty there is also fun to be had. Snorkeling, hiking, and kayaking are all things Bob and Kim do for fun when they make landfall. In addition, they enjoy getting to know locals and exploring all that the natural world has to offer.
“I was a wildlife girl before (this experience of) being on a boat,” Kim laughed. “So one of the really cool experiences we had, just, I guess it’s been maybe two months ago, was we were in Tonga, in the South Pacific, and the humpback whales migrate through there. And so they offer whale-watching and swimming with the whales. You go out with a guide, and they will find a whale for you to be able to get in the water with. And so we signed up to do one of those adventures, and it was a very, very rough and blustery day. Not an ideal day to be jumping in the ocean and swimming with whales, but, you know, we spent the morning and we saw some in the distance, but never were able to get close enough to actually get in the water with them. Well, after lunch, the opportunity was finally there. And so they pulled the boat, you know, as close as they can, and then you snorkel with a guide to be able to swim with the whales. And it was the coolest thing we’ve done for me. You know, I am not somebody who just jumps in the water. I like taking my time, kind of go over the side of the dingy –– not somebody who typically jumps in. The boat was not even done moving, and I was jumping in the water. I was so excited to swim with the whales. It was just incredibly cool. We were able to swim up very close to it, and then it dove down in the water. And then as it came back up, it came back up right near us. And so that was an incredible thing to be able to do that.”
Whales aren’t the only interesting creatures the Stephens have encountered on their adventures. When out at sea you never know what animals may end up cruising past your ship. Manta rays in particular create a stunning display when they appear in large numbers and have been a favorite of Bob’s to witness in the wild.
“Manta rays are very cool, very graceful creatures,” he said. “I actually think I might like them better than the whales, and we’ve seen them a couple of times. We saw them once in the Tuamotus, which is in French Polynesia, and then once here in Fiji. And they’re just incredibly graceful creatures. And so to be able to swim near them and be in the water and watch them swim by is just amazing. So that was very, very cool. I think, you know, in terms of destinations, we’ve visited a lot of places. I think we’re at 20 countries by now. We left from
Georgia in February of 2024 and worked our way down through the Bahamas, through the Caribbean, visited most of the Caribbean islands, down to Grenada, then across to Boner and Aruba, and then to Panama. We transited the Panama Canal in December of 2024. And then in February of 2025, that’s when we left across the Pacific. We arrived in March in French Polynesia. We spent three months in French Polynesia. So we’ve seen a lot of places. I think some of our favorites. I think Puerto Rico was a surprising one. It is, of course, part of the United States. It is an extremely cool place to visit and really people often don’t think about it, or considered it a foreign country, but it is part of the U.S., and it’s really excellent. San Juan, the city’s very historic, really great place to visit, highly recommend. We loved St. John and the U.S Virgin Islands. It’s almost all a national park and it’s beautiful. Lots of hiking there. I really enjoyed Saba, which is just a postage-stamp-sized island in the middle of the Caribbean. It’s basically an extinct volcano rising from the middle of sea. It’s very steep, very hilly, not very many people live there, but it’s very cool to visit.”
Some of the most magical moments, however, happen at sea, where the sunrise and sunset paint a vibrant mosaic each morning and dusk before stars peak out and speckle the night sky with pinpricks of light. These moments are what Kim lives for as she snaps a sunset photo almost every night on board Meraviglia.
“I never get tired of it,” she admitted. “I have a whole panorama of sunrise, sunset pictures, and it is incredibly beautiful and the variety that you can have, even though you think they’ll all be the same. There’s always something, just a little bit different about the picture. The nights are incredible as well, though, because seeing the stars, whether it’s out in the middle of the ocean on passage, or even in some of the anchorages that have very little light, you’re anchored off of a village that doesn’t really have electricity. I’ve never seen the stars and constellations like I’ve seen since we’ve been sailing. So yeah, that’s pretty magical.”
Lack of light pollution makes for incredibly clear nights where stars can be experienced in all their glory, Bob said.
“You can see the Milky Way every night,” he said. “There’s no light pollution. It is incredible. I could look at the stars all night long. I love sailing at night.”
Overcoming obstacles together has become Bob and Kim’s new normal. Every day brings a new challenge that they must solve to keep their ship sailing. With each knot tied, experience replaced the original anxieties that fluttered when they set sail from Georgia.
“I think overcoming that anxiety was a little bit of a struggle in the beginning,” Kim said. ‘And I think the other struggle is just maintaining those relationships, you know, we miss our family, we miss our friends. And so being super intentional about, you know, having FaceTime calls with our kids weekly, you know, staying in touch with our supper club friends in Seguin, you know, through WhatsApp and through video calls when we can, and, you know, our family members that are kind of all over the country. I think that struggle and, you know, not being lonely, because we are traveling a lot, it’s hard to make those friendships along the way when you’ve been moving as fast as we have throughout this journey. And so I think that sometimes it can be a struggle. On the flip side –– cruisers are a very friendly group, so we kind of feel like if there’s another boat out there and you need something, if you reach out to somebody, usually another cruiser is going to come along and help you with what you need, which has been a nice sense of community.”
Gratitude keeps the Stephens going. Thankfulness for community, but also the opportunity of a lifetime.
“Well, I would say we’re just thankful that we’ve had the opportunity,” Bob said. “We’re not retired; we knew that we were going to have to at some point — this was going to come to an end, and we’re going to have to go back to work because we are not wealthy, but we did have the resources to be able to do this, and we’re very, very grateful. One thing that COVID taught us was that nothing is guaranteed. We both lost people we cared about. And so the ability to do this has just been an incredible blessing. So I think that just having the opportunity to do it, I think, is one of the things that we’re very, very thankful for, and the just the ability to be out here and see God’s creation and meet all the wonderful people that we’ve met.”
So while all good things must come to an end, sailing Meraviglia is just getting started. As of right now, the Stephens have scheduled a visit home for the holidays, and after that, they say they don’t really have a plan yet. They might head to New Zealand, or Australia, or anywhere else the wind might blow them on this ongoing search for adventure. •
-
- .JPG
-
- .JPG
