I didn’t set out to join an alternative-living movement. I was broke, needed somewhere else to live, and a friend looked around his family’s boat and said, “Yeah man, you should live on a boat.” So I did.
Long before living in vans, tiny houses and boats became recognizable alternatives to conventional housing, I bought a sailboat because I desperately needed somewhere else to live.
I was in my late twenties, short on money, living in the bottom of my mother’s house, and trying to figure out what came next. My friend Paul was hanging out on his family’s Chris-Craft when he offered a remarkably straightforward solution:
Within about a month I had researched boats, borrowed some money, found financing, and bought a 1974 Morgan Out Island 28. I knew very little about owning a sailboat and considerably less about living aboard one.
Then the education started: yards, haul-outs, through-hulls, weather, electricity, plumbing, engines, sails, storms, docks, neighbors, odd characters, and eventually actually learning to sail on San Francisco Bay because there was nobody else to do it.
(Special thanks to Crazy Richard.)
I originally wrote a full guide explaining why anyone would do this, what it actually cost, the different kinds of liveaboards, what kind of boat works, and the practical realities nobody thinks about until they are already standing on a dock.
This little boat was the gateway. Twenty-eight feet long, roughly nine feet wide, with enough headroom to stand up and just enough space to make an actual life. It wasn’t fancy. It was mine.
The first haul-out alone became an education: inspecting the hull, repairing things I barely understood, replacing a through-hull, and learning very quickly that boat ownership rewards people willing to figure things out.
After years aboard the Morgan, I knew exactly what mattered in a liveaboard: usable interior volume, two real sleeping areas, better light, better sailing, and enough space that living aboard stopped feeling like fitting yourself into the boat.
The Hunter cost substantially more than the Morgan, but it was still dramatically cheaper than conventional housing in Sausalito—and a much better boat.
The old photographs are full of things that were completely ordinary at the time: waking up to the Bay, walking the docks, taking the dinghy for groceries, fixing whatever had decided to stop working, watching fog pour over the hills, and discovering that a marina has its own ecology of people and machines.
I wrote a bunch of them while I was actually living there. The stories are now wrapped in the current site design, while the untouched originals remain preserved in the archive.
