Three Years, Two Parents, Two Kids, One Boat

Chapter 1 · Noa of the Sea

The Author’s Version — an expanded edition of a column first published in Haaretz, Family and Relationships, between July 2024 and February 2026.

July 9, 2024

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It took nearly three years before I started finding tiny pockets of quiet. Before I could steal a few minutes to read a book. Moments that make it possible, finally, to look back at how we ended up here.

Where is here? Right now, our dock lines hold us to a pier on the New River, in Fort Lauderdale’s city marina.

A few weeks ago we crossed the Gulf Stream after five months in the Bahamas, back to Florida.

In two weeks we’ll ride that same current north — all the way to New York, Boston, and Maine.

Life at sea taught me that home isn't a place—it's a feeling you carry within you, no matter where the anchor drops.

For three years we’ve had no fixed address. Every now and then we have a marina address long enough to order packages — a lot of packages.

For three years our home has moved from anchorage to anchorage, bay to bay, powered mostly by wind.

Three years of four people — two parents, two small kids — always, always together on one boat.

“I swear to you, I’d rather be at war than stuck on a boat with kids,” my brother told me honestly, one of the hundreds of times I’d begged him to come visit with his family. And he’s not wrong.

In this dream we’re living, there’s a lot of dream — but there are moments that feel more like a nightmare.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard something like this. “There’s no way I could be with my partner 24/7 on a boat” is another one I get a lot. And sometimes, fair enough.

Sometimes I feel trapped — especially on gray days, storm days — with absolutely no ability to be alone. Really. Truly. Alone.

When you live on the water, weather is everything. If it’s gray outside, it’s very hard not to let that gray in. The upside? When it’s turquoise, that light comes in too — straight into the soul.

And yes, even on a boat, like everywhere else, the exhausted parent’s last refuge is the bathroom. Except on a boat, closing the door isn’t enough — because the kids can appear through the overhead hatch.

Be Grateful

Then, eight months ago, across the ocean that separates us from Israel, October 7th arrived. It tore through everything, even here. Nothing felt the same.

The fragile balance we’d somehow managed to build — built over those three slow years — collapsed along with the world we knew.

Feeling trapped? Stop complaining. Be grateful your family is alive and you have a home. Be grateful you left before this, so you don’t have to carry the guilt of leaving in wartime. Be grateful your home floats — that it moves — that no one can displace you from it.

The whole point of a boat is that you can always pull up anchor and find another bay. That’s everything. That’s what matters.

The kids are exhausting? Be grateful you’re not in captivity. They don’t like what you made for dinner? “Be grateful you have food at all, there are children—” I say it, and stop myself just before telling them about the children who have nothing to eat. The little ones in the tunnels. The children in Gaza who burned alive in the refugee camp at Rafah.

Our bodies in the West, our hearts in the East — that phrase has taken on a whole new meaning. Water carries everything. Even unbearable pain.

Living on a Boat

On days like these, it’s hard to talk about what it actually means to live on a boat.

It means planning your food weeks ahead. You can’t just run to the store — everything is calculated, everything is thought through. How do you cook efficiently on a boat? How much energy does it take? How much did the solar panels pull in today? What do you stock up on at the big American supermarkets, and what can you find at the island shop — but only on the days the mail boat came in and there are still vegetables left? You cook seven days a week, three meals a day, because eating out is a once-every-two-months affair.

Living on a boat means accepting that all plans will change with the wind. It means making, at any given moment, a constant stream of decisions tied directly to the physical safety of yourself and your family: Which weather window is safe to leave in? Did you account for the wind shift tonight when you chose your anchorage? It means being together — parents and kids — without interruption. No school. No schedule. No grandmother down the road, no aunt to call. It means homeschooling, sea-schooling, world-schooling — whatever you want to call it, for better or worse, it’s on us.

It means no dinner out with a friend, no date night, no beer with a buddy. No job to escape to. There is work — but it happens on the boat, in a space where children’s noise is impossible to block out, and it always requires the other adult to cover for you when you step away.

Living on a boat means your partner becomes your co-captain. Think of it as working with your spouse — only significantly worse. We make no decision the other isn’t fully behind. The weight of this vessel and everyone on it is shared. We divide a lot of roles, but not the helm — that belongs to both of us.

Walkie-talkies — sailors call them “marriage savers,” and the name earns it: they let you coordinate from cockpit to bow without screaming across the wind. We bought ours in the first month. The screaming, we decided, we’d keep for indoors.

We were warned from the start: “Don’t quit — the first year is the hardest.” The first year is survival. Every day you celebrate that nobody fell overboard. Every breakdown is the first of its kind. You don’t know enough yet to be scared. Only in the third year did I finally manage to read again. The third year is a good one.

Since October 7th, living on a boat means receiving every Red Alert from the Gaza Envelope — every drone in the south, every launch, every interception in the north. Every “cleared for publication.”

Tomer doesn’t understand why I keep the notifications on.

I’m not sure I do either.

It also means living in a warm international community where people ask what’s happening, genuinely want to understand, and offer sadness and compassion. I find myself giving only half-answers. As an Israeli, living on a boat today means living with a wound that bleeds and festers and burns. Exactly the same as living on land.

When I sink into myself, a Serbian friend — whose family lived as a minority in Kosovo — reminds me there were atrocities there too. “I know what it’s like when your home is at war,” she says, eyes bright. Then she quickly looks away, pulling back onto her face the smile of the part of her that is here, living on a boat. “In wars, there are no winners,” she whispers.

Noa Maiman is a filmmaker, writer, mother, and co-skipper. A trauma survivor in recovery, she is the creator of the web series “A Toolkit for Rape Recovery” and Lemonade — a digital community for women living with trauma from sexual violence. She lives and sails the Atlantic with her partner and their two children aboard a catamaran, since May 2021.

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