As computer guys go, Dan Schiappa is a knowledgeable one. He works in cybersecurity from his home on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where he often heads out for a week or longer aboard RanSomeWhere Else—his Aquila 54. He simply takes his work with him, without missing a beat.
“I never feel like I’m away from the home office,” Schiappa says. “I’m just as productive on the boat as I am at home, except when I look out the window of the Aquila, I have a much better view. You can walk around the entire boat with the laptop. You can sit in the cockpit one day, on the sundeck another day. It’s freedom you can’t get anywhere else.”
Schiappa is far from alone. Two primary forces—the pandemic and the accessibility of Starlink—are driving a sea change in the way boaters choose to work or homeschool their kids from on board. The pandemic normalized working from locations outside the traditional office, while Starlink drastically reduced the costs required to get online from the water. The level of connectivity that used to require thousands of dollars’ worth of domes and other equipment, as well as thousands of dollars a month in service charges, can now be installed and used for hundreds of dollars. Kids can stream whatever they need for the classroom, adults can take video calls with colleagues in the office, and it all can happen on virtually any size boat.
“Any new boat that’s getting commissioned for cruising is going to have Starlink on board,” says Larry Schildwachter, owner of Emerald Harbor Marine in Seattle. “We add it to boats all the time. It’s becoming almost a standard. It’s a lot like watermakers. Twenty years ago, they were options. Now, we don’t see any serious boats leaving the marina without them.”
Starlink is a high-speed, low-latency internet service that works with a sizable constellation of satellites operating in a low orbit around the Earth. The do-it-yourself installation kit includes a terminal known as Dishy McFlatface (it communicates with the satellites), Wi-Fi router, cables and a base. An app lets users customize settings and access support teams for help with installation and operation.
Brooke and Braden Palmer, digital content creators who homeschool their 11- and 9-year-old children from their Nordhavn 55, Mermaid Monster, use Starlink in combination with 5G internet as a backup. “If both kids are on a video call at the same time, the hot spot can be a little better with the 5G internet,” Braden says.
In the beginning the couple, who call Newport, California, home base, did a book-based homeschooling program because they didn’t know how good internet connectivity would be from the boat. But with the newer setup, they’re able to have dedicated tutors help the kids while Brooke and Braden work from the boat and tend to their 11-month-old child.
“We’ll do math with them in the morning on the worksheets, and then in the middle of the day we all get off the boat and do something like hit a museum so the kids learn other stuff. They usually do something educational every single day, because we’re always traveling. Then they come back, relax for a minute, and do their tutoring. And they don’t get days off. We do school year-round, including all summer.”
Each child has a separate space to concentrate, either at the galley table or up at the pilothouse table. It’s a setup similar to what another husband and wife use to work aboard their Marlow Explorer 70E. “My office is in the command bridge. His is in the galley,” says the wife, who prefers to remain annonymous. “That way, we have our separate space.”
Her work is in bookkeeping for investment companies, and she keeps up with it just fine when they leave their North Carolina home for a month or longer to go cruising. She uses a laptop with a TV-size monitor, all looped in through Starlink, and sometimes finds herself working even longer hours than she does on land. “If we’re out on the ocean, my husband drives some, and I drive some. Otherwise I’m on the bridge working,” she says. “It’s a nice office. Not many people have the view that I do.”
Heather Brewer and Paul Bultema also work hard from aboard their Nordhavn 43, Gratitude, which has its home port in Seattle. They’re both in the tech industry, and they started working aboard during the pandemic, prior to Starlink being available. They wanted to be able to have two simultaneous video streams going no matter where they were in the world, so they copied the setup that a chief scientist at Amazon had while circumnavigating. It was based on KVH’s VSAT equipment, and the hardware cost about $30,000. They also used Wi-Fi hot spots and a cellular system, depending on what they could access from different locations.
“On average, over the next two years, we spent about $3,500 on average per month while working full-time from the boat,” Paul says.
When Starlink became available in 2022, they turned off that system and paid $600 for the install. Their monthly costs dropped to $150, and their bandwidth became faster while staying reliable. “With the satellite, we did spend more on communications than we did on diesel,” Heather says. “But it allowed us to do what we wanted to do, and it was pretty amazing.”
She says navigating the technology changes has been one challenge, and navigating landlubber attitudes has been another. While it has become common for people to work from home the past few years, it’s still less common for people to work from a boat—which comes with different types of issues than a house on land.
“You can have all the right technology, but if the weather changes, if you have to move, you’re going to have to drop that conference call,” Heather says. “If you have to have customer calls and the boat’s rocking, it’s just not professional. You can’t tell your customers, ‘I’m on the boat and I might lose the connection.’ It can be stressful. People don’t understand the amount of work it takes [to operate a boat], and that you’re not out there sipping margaritas.”
Lee Wesson, who leaves his home base in Naples, Florida, every year to head to the Caribbean from March or April to June or July, works from on board his Aquila 44, Queen of Virginia. He’s a gaming consultant who has real-estate interests and does day trading, and will sometimes work eight to 10 hours a day on the boat with his Starlink setup.
“Prior to Covid, it was harder to do everything electronically. Many times, especially with a financial institution, you have to show up,” he says. “Now, you can pretty much do anything electronically. Just last night, I had to make a deposit in an account, and even those limits have opened up substantively. This is much better.”
Wesson bought the Aquila after landing in the hospital with Covid and double pneumonia. “My doctor said I should’ve been dead before I got there,” he says. “I came out on the other side and had done fairly well in life, and I said, ‘If I’m ever going to do this boat gig, it’s going to be now.’”
He currently has an Aquila 54 on order and fully intends to equip it with Starlink, which he calls “a game changer.” The new boat is expected to arrive in December and then head to the yard for about two months to be customized. Starlink is just one system that he plans to add; he’s also getting FLIR for night vision, Lumishore lighting for on deck as well as underwater, a JL Audio premium sound system and custom-made tables for the aft deck and inside.
“I’m 70 and this will be the last boat I buy, so I’m going to get it exactly how I want it and be able to work from anywhere in the world I want to go,” he says. “It’s going to be a hell of a boat.”
That attitude is the same one that Schildwachter says he’s seeing among boaters with all kinds of rides at his yard in Seattle.
“It’s always been a big thing here in the Pacific Northwest. Folks leave in the spring or summer, run the company from the boat and then come back in the fall,” he says. “But the cost made it so that you had to be running a good-size company to justify it. This was a $2,000 to $5,000 monthly bill. Phone bills could be $20,000 a month. They could live with it if they were running a very valuable company, but with Starlink now, I have customers of all kinds doing it. A 35-foot pocket cruiser can have internet access. New technology has opened up the door for so many more folks. It has changed the game.”
This article was originally published in the November 2023 issue.
