How Almost A Year At Sea Brought This NYC Family Together

NEW YORK — After a tough turn producing an Off-Broadway play, Erik Orton found himself working nights at a temp job in the Financial District in 2008. The Washington Heights dad had a respite on his 4 p.m. to midnight shift: Walking along the Hudson River, where he would see sailboats on the water.

To Orton, now 44, sailing had felt like something “for other people.” But the idea of doing it hearkened back to the mornings he spent looking at the stars while delivering The Washington Post as a teenager in northern Virginia.

“The stars have always been the same, and sailing is something that’s been happening for thousands of years,” he said. “And I just thought, it’d be really cool to step into that river, so to speak, join in on that human activity that’s been going on for all those years.”

There was a sailing school just a short walk from where Orton worked. Eventually he convinced his wife, Emily, and their two oldest children, Karina and Alison, to take lessons — even despite Emily’s fear of deep water.

They got off to a rough start. As they struggled to wrangle their vessel on their first family outing that summer, people on speed boats and jet skis just pointed and laughed, Erik said.

But it didn’t take too long for a love of sailing to take hold. From February to October 2014, the couple and their five kids — Karina, Alison and Sarah Jane, Eli and Lily — voyaged from the Caribbean back to Manhattan on a catamaran called Fezywig.

The Ortons chronicled their trip on a blog that shares the boat’s name. And now they’re sharing their story in “Seven at Sea,” their new book about the experience that comes out March 5.

The adventure had its ups and downs — and their boat barely survived — but in the end it “galvanize[d]” the family’s relationships, Emily, 44, said.

“Good memories are an investment that always increase in value,” she said. “There’s no guarantees that our lives will be long, that our health would hold out. We didn’t know. We figured, just — let’s go now while our kids are here with us.”

The Ortons started planning the trip in 2010. It was a big financial and logistical undertaking with plenty of risks.

But as the idea germinated, the Ortons thought about the risks of not going.

“I said, ‘What could go right? What could work out? What could be awesome about this?’” Erik said. “What we had was good but we thought there might be something better, and we thought it was worth the risk.”

Erik started shopping for boats and would send Emily “Boat of the Day” emails. (There were often five boats of the day, Emily said.) They did trial trips in Florida and the Virgin Islands.

Eventually they bought their 38-foot catamaran for $150,000 — sight unseen, according to their blog — packed their lives into duffel bags and plastic storage bins, and went to the island of Saint Martin to pick it up.

Despite the Ortons’ optimistic thinking, it didn’t take long for something to go badly. Something was wrong with one of their boat’s engines. A planned weeklong stay in Saint Martin turned into three months, Erik said.

But it also didn’t take long for something to go right. They made friends with two other families who also had catamarans. The three groups had 12 kids, two dogs and a cat between them. They hiked volcanoes, traveled to different islands and had taco nights together.

“I feel like I’m a pretty high-paced guy, and this kind of just forced me to say, ‘Look, you’re not in control,’” Erik said. “‘You gotta wait on the ocean.’”

Eventually the Ortons set off for the Virgin Islands. They hit Puerto Rico and the Bahamas before heading up the United States’ East Coast. They got accustomed to the constant movement inherent to sailing, a rocking that stuck with them even on land.

The sound of barnacles rubbing against the boat lulled them to sleep. The stars and the Milky Way burst through a night sky untouched by light pollution. The kids got face time with sea life; one day a pod of dolphins swam with their boat after a big storm. Every sunset was stunning.

They found routines. Erik would wake before everyone else and write. Emily, a former English teacher, would have school with the kids until lunchtime while Erik worked on the boat. The three oldest kids were responsible for cooking each day’s meals.

“We had to be conscientious about our time to still be with the family,” Erik said. “It was just as easy to get distracted and not be together living on a boat as it was at home.”

The Ortons’ youngest child, Lily, now 11, has Down’s syndrome. Before the trip, Emily said, the girl’s world was largely confined to the Ortons’ home and the playground across the street, as four therapists would each visit her twice a week.

But Emily noticed that “when her curiosity was peaked, she was motivated to stretch beyond what she could already do.” She scaled back the therapists’ visits so they would have more flexibility for other activities. And Lily still progressed “at the same rate or better,” Emily said.

The trip helped continue that, she said.

“We decided that having this really concrete experience interfacing with the world could be awesome for her, and it was,” she said.

The Ortons worked as a team throughout the trip, Emily said. That came in handy when their boat started to sink off the New Jersey shore.

The inflatable dinghy came loose from the boat one terrifying day near the end of the trek. One of its lines got caught on the boat’s propeller, which broke a hole in the outer seal. Water seeped in. “Stuff was starting to float inside the boat,” Erik said.

The ordeal was “pretty traumatizing,” he said, but the family didn’t panic in the moment. As they started removing the water from the boat, the girls started singing Taylor Swift’s “Shake If Off,” Emily said

“This was like a, ‘Hey everybody, it’s two in the morning and you have to get out of bed right now because we have an issue’ — and they all just woke up and started singing,” Emily said. “It was a pretty unexpected moment.”

The Ortons took a rental car back to New York City while their boat was repaired. Salt water had made Emily’s purse impossible to open and Erik sliced it open with a hunting knife to pay a toll on the New Jersey Turnpike — only to find foreign money inside.

A few weeks later they drove back down to retrieve the boat — and finally finish the last leg of their journey.

They sailed into New York Harbor and up the Hudson River, right past where they took their first lessons. As they reached the George Washington Bridge, their finish line, Erik burst out laughing.

“We were home,” Erik said.

Wanderlust stuck with the Ortons. After a couple years of regular life, they took a four-month road trip to the western U.S. and Canada. There have also been treks to Hawaii, French Polynesia and Europe.

Erik has two pieces of guidance for families who want to go on their own adventures but have reservations: “It’s not as difficult as you think, and it’s totally worth it.”

“We came to believe that our kids were actually not an obstacle, but actually a reason to go,” he said. “Instead of being an excuse, they were the motivation to do this.”

Karina, one of the kids who first learned to sail with her parents, is now 21 and now lives in Utah. Toward the end of the voyage, Emily asked her how the experience had changed her.

“I don’t think it’s changed me,” Emily recalled her saying. “I think it’s made me more myself.”