Sophia on SV Bogumila: What Three Years at Sea Gave Our daughter
Three years ago, Sophia had a desk in a classroom in Killingly, Connecticut.
Now she has a cockpit. A guitar. A mask and fins that never fully dry.
People ask us all the time how she's doing out here. Is she lonely? Is she behind in school? Does she miss "normal"?
So here's the real answer.
One boat at a time
Sophia was three and a half the first time we put her on a boat. It was a little Compac 16 on the lakes near home.
Then came the Tartan 28. That was our first time out on the ocean. We spent weekends on Long Island Sound: Watch Hill, Fishers Island, all the way up to Newport.
Then the Hunter 376. We found her on Lake Champlain and spent two weeks bringing her home through Vermont and New York. That boat took us to the Bahamas.
And now there's Bogumila II, a Hunter 45DS. She's our home and Sophia's classroom, and some days a very small gym.
So Sophia didn't jump into this life. She grew into it, one boat at a time.
Leaving the classroom
Pulling her out of school was the scariest part. Scarier than any passage.
Killingly was everything she knew. Her home. Her favorite teachers. Her family close by.
We were asking her to leave all of that behind.
We worried about all of it. Would she fall behind? Would she miss her friends? Were we being selfish? Sophia didn't worry at all. She was excited. Just ready for the adventure.
And here's the thing. We thought it was one year. One year out, then back home, back to school, back to normal. That first year changed the plan.
She made so many friends. Kids on other boats, sailing the same route we were. We buddy-boated together across the Bahamas: same anchorages, same beaches, the same kids knocking on our hull every afternoon. By the end of that year, she had zero interest in going back to regular school.Truth is, neither did we.
Three-plus years and 10,000+ nautical miles later, here we are.
A day in her life
People picture a boat kid's day as either total chaos or a nonstop adventure. It's neither.
Sophia's up around 7. Sometimes earlier, to catch the sunrise.
Most mornings I find her sitting in the cockpit, having her big thoughts. Watching the sky turn colors. Sometimes with her camera. Sometimes with her sketchbook. Sometimes with nothing at all. We leave her be. That quiet time is hers.
Then the rest of us start moving. Someone's making coffee. Bolt wants to go to shore.
After breakfast, she gets herself ready for class. Nobody has to drag her there. She sets up at the salon table with her laptop and notebooks, and the salon turns into a classroom.
Acellus video, notes by hand, quiz, next lesson. She's usually done before noon.
That's the part that surprises people. There's no commute. No bus. No waiting for twenty other kids to settle down. No homeroom, no lining up for lunch. Just her, the lesson and a quiet boat. After school, she takes a break. Then she reads for an hour. That's our one requirement, and it isn't up for negotiation. After that, she's free.
Some days that means freediving off the back of the boat. Some days it's the guitar. Some days she paddleboards over to friends, or heads to shore with friends.
Some days the camera comes out. Other days it's the sketchbook. She sketches everything she sees: forts, churches,flowers, boats in the anchorage, the view from the cockpit.
There are chores too, because this is a home, not a hotel. The rule is simple. If she has chores, they get done before we go off on an adventure anywhere.
Evenings, we eat together. Every night we just hang out together. No one's rushing off anywhere.
School is wherever we drop the anchor
On paper, her school looks normal. This year it's math, grammar, world history, physical science, geography and Spanish.
She takes her notes by hand. That's our rule. It slows the day down. It makes her handwriting better. And she can flip back through a notebook in a way she can't with a screen. That reading hour adds up. Hatchet book hits differently when you're anchored off an island with no people on it. So does Island of the Blue Dolphins.
But the best lessons don't come from the course. On her first black sand beach, in Deshaies, a magnet and a handful of sand turned into geology, chemistry and physics before lunch.
In Dominica, she stood at Trafalgar Falls. Two waterfalls drop into the same pool there. One is hot from a sulphur spring, and the other is cold mountain water. You could feel the line between them. She learned that Dominica has 365 rivers, one for every day of the year. She learned about the Mountain Chicken frog, which is now gone. She also learned that a hurricane once wiped out a medical school and pushed it to another country.
No textbook covers that like standing there does.
How she has time for all of it
We get this question a lot. How does she do freediving, guitar, photography, sketching AND school?
The answer is easier to see if you look at what her life used to be.
Back in Connecticut, Sophia danced. Ballet, tap, jazz and hip hop, two or three days a week at the studio.
She loved it. But our weeks ran on the clock. School all day. Homework. Then a quick dinner a drive to the studio, a change of shoes, class, and the drive home. Then bed, and the same thing the next day.There wasn't much room left over. Not for her, and not for us.
Out here, the clock mostly disappears. School is done before noon. Nobody has to drive anywhere. The whole afternoon is just sitting there, open. That's how she has time for all of it. Not because she's busier, but because her days aren't chopped into pieces anymore.
She doesn't do everything every day, either. Her interests come in waves. A few weeks of guitar. Then a reef shows up and it's all freediving and watching fish for hours.Then the camera comes out and she takes a hundred flower photos in an afternoon.
There's no 4:00 lesson and no 5:30 practice. When she wants to do something, she does it, because the time is there.That's the real gift of this life. Not the beaches. The time.
And sometimes she does absolutely nothing
We want to be really clear about this part, because Instagram makes it look like boat kids are always out on an adventure.She isn't. Some days Sophia does nothing at all. And she loves it.Her favorite place to do it is her cabin. It's her space. All her things are in there. Posters and pictures cover the walls. It's the one spot on the boat that's completely hers.
She lies in there with the hatch open and the boat rocking. She reads. She daydreams. She doesn't do much of anything. At first, we worried about it. Shouldn't she be doing something? Learning something? Making the most of it?
Then we realized that this is making the most of it.
Most kids her age don't get to be bored. Every minute is filled with school, activities, homework and screens. Out here, she gets long, empty afternoons. That's where her best ideas come from. That's where she figures out what she actually likes.
Doing nothing isn't wasted time. For her, it might be the most important part of the day.
The moments we keep coming back to
Rowing up the Indian River in Dominica with our guide, Alexis. No motor, just oars under a tunnel of bloodwood trees. Iguanas were sunning themselves on the branches. We're a big Pirates of the Caribbean family, and Tia Dalma's hut was filmed right there. Alexis made Sophia a bird out of a palm leaf. Swimming into Titou Gorge, through the narrow black volcanic channel from the same movies. Spotting an agouti at the hot springs.
Sandy Island in Carriacou. Pink sand, crystal water, and our boat's name painted on the wall at Paradise Beach Club, right next to our friends' names. Spicemas, Grenada's carnival.
And then there are the forts. Every new country, she and Tony try find the fort. But firts they raise the flag. It's a tradition she won't let us skip.
Who she's becoming
Here's what surprised us most. She's thriving out here.
Back home, she was shy. Now she talks with everyone. Other cruisers, kids on the dock, locals in every port, our guide in Dominica. She'll start a conversation with anyone.
And school? She's doing really well. All those worries about falling behind turned out to be for nothing. We're proud of her routine, too. Nobody stands over her. She gets up, gets ready, sits down at the salon table and gets it done, day after day. That kind of discipline can't be taught. She built it herself.
Okay, not every day. Sometimes she wants to play hooky. The water's too perfect, or friends are heading to the beach, or she just isn't feeling it. And that's okay too. That's one of the perks of boat school. She catches up later. She always does. She freedives. She sketches everything she sees. She plays guitar in the cockpit. She picked up my camera this year and now takes better photos than I do. Wildlife. Flowers. Boats.
And she cares about the ocean. Really cares. When you swim over reefs she notice when they're hurting. In Carriacou she saw what Hurricane Beryl did to Tyrell Bay, and she saw people rebuilding. She's growing up more aware of the world than we were at her age. Not because we taught her. Because she's been out in it.
The friend question
Every boat parent gets this one. What about friends?
That first year in the Bahamas answered it for us. Sophia was surrounded by them. A whole fleet of boat kids, moving from island to island together.
Boat kids find each other fast. There's no small talk. One day they meet, and the next they're snorkeling together. Some of those friendships stuck. A few of those families have stopped sailing, and we still talk and keep in touch. Out here, the faces keep changing. She's met lots of boat kids along the way, mostly boys. She paddleboards with her friend from Mellow Puff. Most mornings she walks Bolt with a friend in Grenada.
So when she meets a boat girl, she's thrilled. It's always fun to watch how fast they connect. One minute they're strangers, the next they're inseparable.But there are also stretches when it's just us. No other kids in the anchorage. No buddy boats. Just the three of us, Bolt, and a lot of open water. That's the hardest part for her. We won't pretend it isn't. But she always finds something to do. She plays games online with friends, same as kids back home. Sometimes she calls a friend back home just to talk. Boat kids stay in touch from different islands and different countries. Other times she comes up with her own ideas. Let's walk the beach. Let's go for a swim. Let's go see what's around that point. And off we go.
And she has her cabin, her own little world. Those quiet stretches have made the three of us close in a way we never were on land. We play games. We talk. We know each other really well now. And when she does find other boat kids again, she runs to them.
What we've learned as parents
Kids are tougher than we give them credit for. They rise to what you expect of them.
Boredom isn't the enemy. Some of her best ideas came on days with nothing to do.
And you can't fake this life to a kid. She sees us stressed during repairs. She sees us tired after a 25-hour upwind passage. She also sees us figure it out together. We think that matters more than anything we could tell her.
She tells it better than we do
Latitudes & Attitudes featured her in their Next Gen section. We're still a little stunned.
She's also been writing her own posts: 12 Things I Know at 12 and Part 2. If you want the view from the kid herself, start there. https://www.svbogumila.com/post/14-more-things-i-know-at-12-that-land-kids-probably-don-t
Where we go from here? We don't know exactly what's next. That's kind of the point.
But we do know one thing. Sophia will go to college.
People sometimes assume boat kids drift through life with no plan. Not her. She already finished her College and Career Readiness course on Acellus. She's thinking about it.
What she'll study is up to her. Marine biology? Architecture? Photography? Something none of us have thought of yet? We don't mind. We just want her to chase whatever drives her. Whatever she's passionate about. That's what this life has given her, more than anything. The time to find out what she loves. For now, she's growing up out here, in her own way and at her own pace, with salt in her hair and a notebook full of sketches.
We're just lucky we get a front-row seat. ⚓
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