seas the day

Who’s in your family?

There’s me (Behan), Jamie and our three kids: Niall (20), who moved off the boat last year to start uni, Mairen (17) and Siobhan (15).

What motivated you to sell your belongings and set sail?

More than anything, it was about putting our family first. We also wanted to pull our kids away from our consumer-driven society. We wanted them to know, through direct experiences, about world realities, social injustices and climate change. We wanted them to be citizens of the world instead of citizens of a privileged community in a privileged country.

Describe your boat, Totem.

The best way to describe it is that it’s like a three-bedroom, two-bathroom campervan. It’s 14.3 metres long, but unlike a campervan, it has pointy ends. So the living space is quite a bit smaller.

We no longer have lives driven by our jobs and our children’s conventional needs ... we have this incredibly free life exploring the world as a family.

What was life like before you moved onto your boat in 2008?

We had incredible jobs we loved and earned good money, but we didn’t have enough time for our family. Our kids were growing up fast, and we realised life goes in a blink.

About two months after our second child was born, in 2002, Jamie’s mother died, giving us