Fly Fishing Insider Podcast
A sinking 28-foot sailboat bought for $1,500 became a full-time home in December, wood stove included, in roughly 240 square feet. The plan is to learn to sail properly on the Inside Passage first, then head south, through the Panama Canal, up the Eastern Seaboard and eventually across to Scotland.
John Schneider is a former Arctic fly fishing guide and organic grain farmer who now lives aboard a small sailboat on the Washington coast and documents the life on YouTube.
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How do you end up living on a sailboat with no sailing experience?
The idea came out of a boat building book bought years earlier to learn how to build a plywood and epoxy drift boat. One chapter covered building a small sailboat with a cabin, and the photograph of someone camping aboard it was the trigger. The assumption that sailboats cost hundreds of thousands of dollars turned out to be wrong: sub-30-foot production fiberglass boats from the 1980s and 1990s sell for $10,000 to $15,000. What actually got bought was worse and better than that, a boat literally sinking at the dock with a dead motor, for $1,500. The wreck was the appeal, because a lifetime of farm work had produced skills in diesel mechanics, electrical, fiberglass and welding, and a project boat gave a new YouTube channel something to document.
What does winter aboard a small sailboat actually look like?
Living aboard started in December, meaning the first months were winter months on the water near the Canadian border. January brought a cold snap and more than a foot of snow on the boat. A wood stove with a small roaster on top keeps the cabin comfortable. The living space is roughly 240 square feet, which changes what possessions mean: there is no room to store a wardrobe, so switching from winter clothes to summer clothes is a swap rather than a rotation, and the practical inventory is one clean set of clothes and one dirty set.
Why sail to Scotland specifically?
Living aboard alone did not answer the question of what the point was, and the destination supplied it. The pull is ancestral: adopted as a child, the biological family name is Fraser, and a grandmother he spent a great deal of time with kept a house steeped in Scotland, returning there regularly, with an aunt teaching Highland dancing in the basement. Getting there by sail turns a lifestyle into a voyage with a purpose, and the estimate is a two to three year journey. The intent along the way is to collect people, food, places and stories rather than simply make miles.
What route does a Pacific Northwest boat take to Scotland?
The plan runs south down the west coast, through the Panama Canal into the Caribbean, up the Eastern Seaboard, and then across via either the Azores or the Greenland and Iceland route, which is described as the more treacherous of the two. Whether it happens aboard the current boat is an open question. The 28-foot boat is a coastal cruiser; plenty of similar boats have made transatlantic and transpacific crossings, but this one is not currently set up for it. Present work is toward voyage-worthy standards rather than the crossing itself: navigation and communications electronics, and power generation and storage to keep filming.
How do you build sailing experience before an ocean crossing?
The Inside Passage is treated as the training ground because it combines big open water with large tidal flows and substantial current swings, so an angler who can sail there can sail most places. The one thing it does not offer is wide open ocean, which is available by going around the far side of Vancouver Island. Alongside that, crewing on a 43-foot offshore racer, a genuine blue water long-distance boat, teaches aspects a small boat never will, through races and cruising events across a season. The governing rule quoted throughout is that the thing most likely to get you killed on a sailboat is having a schedule, so the only problem worth solving on any given day is the weather.
How do you get comfortable with discomfort?
The tolerance was built over decades of traditional bow hunting, which is difficult and rarely successful, and years guiding above tree line in the Yukon and on vast fresh water in the Northwest Territories in dangerous conditions. What came out of that is a working belief that discomfort ends. Being cold, wet or physically miserable is now something to prepare for and even look forward to, because every minute of discomfort is a minute closer to comfort. The same framework gets applied to mental discomfort: heartbreak, being broke, or being unable to solve a mechanical problem on the boat. The corollary is that the depth of a low sets the height of the joy that follows it, which is the argument against the emotionally flat years that preceded this.
What is the fly fishing plan aboard the boat?
The stated goal is to fly fish for food rather than troll lead weights behind a motorboat, which is what most of the local fleet does. The species list is deliberately unglamorous: sole, flounder, surf perch and rockfish, alongside crabbing, foraging and diving, with dive gear kept aboard. The background behind that is substantial. An early career guiding on Great Slave Lake in the Arctic produced strategies for fly fishing shallow water lake trout, plus Arctic grayling and northern pike up to about 30 pounds sitting in a foot and a half of clear water littered with logs.
Key takeaways
- Used production fiberglass sailboats under 30 feet from the 1980s and 1990s sell in the $10,000 to $15,000 range, not the six figures most people assume.
- A liveaboard boat around 240 square feet forces seasonal clothing to be swapped rather than stored.
- The Inside Passage builds sailing skill because it combines open water, large tidal flows and strong currents; wide open ocean has to be sought separately.
- A schedule is the most dangerous thing to carry on a sailboat; the weather is the only problem worth solving on a given day.
- Discomfort ends, so preparing for it and accepting it is more useful than avoiding it.
- Crewing on a larger offshore boat teaches things a small boat cannot, and costs nothing but time.
