More than four years ago, the Argentinean family Constanza Coll (Coni), graphic designer, journalist and writer, and Juan Dordal, psychologist, decided to make a big change in their way of life. They give up a stable job, and the security and comfort of their home in Buenos Aires, to embark on the adventure of travelling and living as a family on board a sailing boat.
Coni, Juan and their two-year-old son Ulises start their journey on the 9-metre sailing boat ‘Tangaroa 2’, and from Argentina they reach the coast of Brazil, where they gradually make their way northwards.
In these years of life on board, with journeys and freedom, in the midst of nature, but also with difficulties and uncertainties, many things have happened to them; the birth of their second daughter Renata and the incorporation into the family of the little dog Lula, whom they adopted in one of the ports of their voyage, stand out.
Another significant detail is the change of the sailboat, to a slightly larger one, a Jeanneau Sunrise 35, about 11 metres long; undoubtedly a necessary improvement as the family grows.
We thank Coni and Juan for sharing with us, in this interview, their exciting experience of life on board as a family, and the ‘El Barco Amarillo’ project.
Juan, what were your beginnings in the nautical world like? What steps did you take until you embarked on this adventure?
I like to think philosophically that the nautical is at the origin of mankind’s fantasies. I recently read something very beautiful, which is in the book ‘Moby-Dick’, which says that at some point we all look to the horizon, to the sea, and yearn for distant lands and adventures. There is something about the nautical that I think is constitutive of the human being.
Now, well, in more concrete and material matters, the first one who got close to the world of sailing was Coni. When she was very young, her family used to spend the summer in Madryn (Puerto de Madryn), when it was a very small town in the Argentinean Patagonia, which still today has the same brutal winds and cold waters that you can visit and enjoy. And she had some sailing and ‘opti-mist’ lessons, which is not for everyone, isn’t it, great fun.
After that, she wasn’t part of any of our lives until adulthood. At some point, while working for a magazine, in her early professional career as a journalist, she was invited to go sailing on the Río de la Plata, and as a good boyfriend, I joined in the experience, which was a bit anecdotal.
The sailboat was a beautiful boat, made of wood, too big, it could be a ‘Light 3’. It was beautiful, and I remember getting on the sailboat and saying, what is this, it was like getting on a Stradivarius, wasn’t it, an important piece, a piano, I don’t know, a work of art.
And when we went out to sail on the Río de la Plata, it was choppy as it usually is, with this short wave, and the truth is that it was a captivating image in itself, with the white sail, the wood, the foam. Recontraloco, I do remember that getting on it was like being transported to another world, like those people in the microcentro who get into the sauna and suddenly they are in another universe, there within reach, very close.
But well, leaving philosophy aside, I had a horrible time, I got very dizzy. Coni had a great time, while I was watching that situation, the helmsman was steering the boat, with those seductive looks between the captain and the journalist, and I was throwing up on the leeward side, wasn’t it, a horrible thing.
But I realised that there was something there. That there was, to put it in a way, a kind of grandeur, something that caught my attention, that attracted me deeply. But the truth is that I had such a bad time, that I didn’t give it much thought, nor did Coni, and we didn’t go sailing again until a few years later.
I had a job that I had aspired to for a long time, and when I had it in my profession as a psychologist it made me deeply unhappy, I was very stressed, etc… I quit that job. With the prepayments and social security, which pay badly and at the wrong time, I knew that I was going to have a little bit of money coming in month by month, and so I decided to look for something different from a job as a psychologist, I decided not to look for a job, but to look for something different. I wanted to do something different and see what would happen, nothing, a recreation.
I was lucky enough to meet, or destiny crossed paths with a great man, Jorge Correa, a real great man, a navigator like few others. Among other things, I discovered that with a Taurus 580, a 19-foot sailboat initially designed to sail in the delta or the Río de la Plata, in more or less sheltered waters, he prepared it according to the criteria of international insurance companies for ocean-going boats and, well, that is how the ‘Tangaroa’ was born, which was our first sailboat.
The ‘Tangaroa’ crossed the Atlantic, yes, Jorge, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ sailing, put the ship in a container and crossed the Atlantic. It is still today the smallest Argentinean ship to have made that crossing, isn’t it? From north to south it made the Canary Islands-Noronha, Noronha-Buenos Aires, stopping off, going for a walk.
I do the course with him, there is an enchantment, I become his disciple, he becomes my teacher, and we are quickly teaching together. In that little boat, the ‘Tangaroa’, he had given me the power to sail and we could even take it out of the country. It was our first boat and with Coni we sailed it a lot, while I was giving sailing lessons.
We sailed a 19-foot ocean-going boat and we knew the boat would hold. We were the ones who didn’t know if we could handle certain navigations, so we did what all aspiring sailors do in the Río de la Plata, and we started to look a little further and further ahead.
The first feat we did was to cross the Rio de la Plata, I always say the same thing, leaving land behind us and finding it in the bow after having lost it, after having had a horizon of water, when that happened to me, when we arrived at Colonias I felt like Columbus.
And so we started to go round and round, Montevideo, that was another beautiful sailing, we went with Coni to meet Eduardo Rejduch, another great sailor who has the book ‘Hasta donde me lleve el viento’ (As far as the wind takes me). His boat is the ‘Charrua’, a 28-footer, and well, we went on the hunt for him and the salt water in the ‘Tangaroa’. And we took a Champagne, sailing east towards the sea, we were testing the water, stretching our hand overboard, and the moment it became salty we uncorked the Champagne. Then we went to Punta del Este to go to the ocean and we sailed to La Paloma in a beautiful, beautiful sailing and that was the end of Uruguay.
We went, we came back and it was impressive, but well, there appeared on our horizon the possibility of buying the ‘Tangaroa 2’ (see photo above), which is the boat built by our master, Jorge Correa, his second boat, a 28-foot steel boat that was later extended at the stern, and which Coni later made into ‘El Barco Amarillo’ (The Yellow Boat) through the networks.
Well, on that boat Jorge had already lived as a family for two years with his daughter and his wife. Somehow, always without wanting to, when the possibility of buying the boat arose, I honestly bought it, and I speak in the singular, because it is in Coni’s book, she didn’t want it. It seemed to me that it was absolutely coherent, teaching on the Rio de la Plata we were going to have the three Tangaroas.
Jorge sells the Yellow Boat (‘Tangaroa 2’) to buy ‘Tangaroa 3’, then suddenly a structure is put together in the school where ‘Tangaroa 3, “Tangaroa 2 and ”Tangaroa 1’ (see picture above), and we as always looking to see where we could sail a little further. So the possibility to go to Florianópolis came up.
I really mean it, I am not fitting the reality to the poetry I want to tell, but we are sure that the first night we spent on board the ‘Tangaroa’ was when we got Ulysses.
Well, at some point during the course, still with our lives in Buenos Aires, Coni working, already raising Uli who was one year old, and me as a psychologist and sailing teacher at weekends with my partner and teacher Jorge, we made a selection of the students who deserved it, who had stood out the most, and we sailed to Florianópolis.
When I arrived in Florianópolis, I got a very, very big chip, the boat was left there, and I travelled to Buenos Aires by plane. After much to-ing and fro-ing we decided with Coni not to bring the boat back to Buenos Aires, to leave our jobs, take the plane to Florianópolis, embark and continue sailing.
That was like the origin of sailing in us and the steps we took until the origin of this trip.
Juan, what motivated you to make such an important change in your way of life, what is the most difficult part of realising a dream like this?
Well, I had other ideas before, and I would have told you other things. In reality, at the beginning of this, what we had were fears, uncertainties and hopes. With time, after more than four years here, I can assure you that we didn’t choose anything.
I feel that the day I stepped on deck for the first time, my teacher says it in a very nice way, he says that ships choose their captains, and somehow I felt that this was the place for us. The same thing happened to Coni, maybe she relates it in a different way, but with the boys too, we see that they have a harmony, we are on land and they want to come to the boat.
Now I see that I feel I didn’t have a choice when I started with Coni, when we started to see those stories of sailors, those life stories. Her work as a journalist travelling around the world, and the possibilities we had, I worked for Aerolíneas Argentinas and I had easy access to tickets, she got boat tickets in different places, in the Caribbean, Europe, but always as a holiday or boat rental. But this allowed us to be in the world of people who go around and sail, and so we were also able to see that way of life in a fleeting way, a dream.
Every time we saw that it was more and more possible, we already had a bigger boat and, well, suddenly the dream became possible. I think that one is only responsible for one’s desire, and I think one has to be coherent, don’t you? When you wish for something for a long time, which is what we did while reading, fantasising, while watching videos of other people sailing, we made a wish grow and when the concrete opportunity appeared, which was the boat in paradise, it only occurred to us that instead of bringing it back we would continue sailing to a place that was warmer and warmer for us, at least it was warmer for us.
Today I tell you it wasn’t a decision, it was almost a logical conclusion, or it was something that grabbed us by the nose and dragged us here. I think that’s the nicest way to think about it and the difficult thing is the same as always, it’s the baggage. The difficult thing is to cut out everything that you think is indispensable for your life, you carry a very heavy backpack of social work, of what do I know, of pensions, of fears, of injuries or the size of the waves. You have a lot of certainties about what you have to do to be happy and sailing is always an adventure, isn’t it?
To go to live sailing is in a way to choose to live happily, and there are no guarantees, i.e., what comes out of it will be the result of your work and that implies an initial renunciation and a certain courage or rather a certain madness to give yourself to whatever comes, with the skills you have and the certainty that you will have to develop those you have not yet mastered, right?
Coni, what is the meaning of ‘El Barco Amarillo’, is it the colour of a sailboat, the title of a book, or can you explain what the project is about?
The boat is called ‘Tangaroa 2’, now in fact it lives next to our new boat in Abraao Bay on the Big Island. We sold it so that we could buy the one we live on now, which is a ‘Jeannou 35’; and when we sold it, everyone asked us: are you going to paint this new boat yellow?
Of course we said no, ‘El Barco Amarillo’ is a concept, although the boat we left with, the ‘Tangaroa 2’, was painted yellow and blue at the time, ‘El Barco Amarillo’ became a brand, a concept, an idea and a way of life, right?
Because in between we travelled, we did other things than just sailing, and all of that fits into the big balloon of ‘The Yellow Boat’. It’s like a way of life really, and of course, the book I wrote was called ‘El Barco Amarillo’, because it sums up exactly the life we led during the two years we lived since we set sail from Florianópolis, well no, the book goes back before that.
From life in Buenos Aires and how we made the decision, and how we moved from a big flat, with the car, the prepayment, the baby’s garden and everything, to living in 10 square metres and full of uncertainties, because we had no idea what we were going to live in, and the book goes up to Renata’s birth, which was on the new boat, in Niterói.
But well, the book was written almost entirely in the aft cabin of the ‘Tangaroa 2’, in that inclined position that allows you the camber of the side of the boat, and well that’s ‘The Yellow Boat’. In fact, now we are starting a backpacking trip and we are not going to do another Instagram that is the red backpack or anything like that, the idea is to continue this story of a light, simple and complex life.
It will also continue to be ‘The Yellow Boat’, because it reminds us of that moment, that decision, it was thanks to the boat that we were able to go through everything we have done up to this point. So this tribute will remain forever.
You started the adventure with a 9-metre sailboat and after a while you changed to an 11-metre boat. What qualities would you highlight in these two boats?
Well, we changed boats and it was quite a moment, wasn’t it? Our son Ulises was 4 years old at the time and he didn’t want to know anything about changing boats, he told us that he liked the other one. When you asked him why, he would say ‘because it’s yellow’, or he would say ‘because all my toys are there’. It was difficult because we were leaving a ship with a lot of history, with many happy moments, our two children were born there, and the best moments of our lives were left there between the sheets of the ‘Tangaroa 2’.
When we moved to this new, much more spacious boat, it had a lot of comforts that the other boat didn’t have, three cabins with doors, a gas cooker that the other one had, two stoves, an oven with grill, a fridge… well, a lot of things that for a family of four, plus a puppy, plus all the people who were already coming to the yellow boat as guests, the truth is that we needed space and it was a very good decision, because it allowed us to continue.
Possibly, if we had stayed on the yellow boat we would have been uncomfortable and we would have ended up getting tired. This new boat called ‘Itaca’ is a very comfortable boat and within a length, 35 feet, that we can carry and maintain very well.
We missed a bit the solidity of the steel boat, we felt invincible on that boat, and we felt that any storm was a small thing. On a plastic boat, at least on this one, we didn’t feel that way, and it’s a 90’s boat, with a good amount of fibre and everything, but what do I know, it must be that we got used to the weight of a steel boat as well. But we don’t miss the work of the steel boat, this sanding and painting all the time, don’t we, the care that the boat needs.
Coni, do you miss anything, any comfort of a house on land?
The truth is that we don’t miss the comfort of a house at all. During the time we have been on the Ilha Grande, an opportunity came up to buy a very nice piece of land with sea views in Vila do Abraao, which is very touristy, and we built two ecological houses with many concepts and ideas that came from life on the boat, right? They are ‘Off the Grid’ houses, as they say in the jungle, where you can breathe air everywhere, they are elevated and a river runs underneath.
When we were building them, people said to us: ‘Now that they have a house in a place they like, they are going to move into the house and never come back to the boat again’. Now, at the moment we are on the boat, the houses are rented out and we wouldn’t trade living in those houses for anything. Yes, sometimes we go on holiday, or we take three or four days to go to the house, because it’s a nice feeling to be in that particular wooden house, but the truth is that we are on the boat and we don’t miss that.
Yes, suddenly we can get to miss it, and that’s why we are proposing a hitchhiking or backpacking trip, we are trying to define this year’s project which is going to be a bit different. We are going to leave the sea and the times of the sea to take some flights and show the kids a bit of another world, another world different from the one they are used to, of being on the standup board all day, of the fish, of life floating, of the times you saw, of going at 4/5 knots, other cultures. We spent the last 5 years in Brazil and we need to change a bit, so I don’t know what is going to happen with this missing the boat when we are in other places, but we are also looking at the possibility of finding another boat, another story, starting something new.
Juan, how important is meteorology in route planning?
The study of meteorology for me depends on the type of sailing you are going to do, doesn’t it? I’ll be honest, now that we have a ‘poita’, as we call a borneo, a buoy that has a ton of concrete with a line for a transatlantic liner, and on top of that we are in a hyper-protected bay in the interior sea of Abraao on Ilha Grande, meteorology is more anecdotal than anything else, today it rains or it’s hot, one has a touristic view of meteorology.
But it was totally different when we had to sail, for example, from ‘Guaraparí’ to ‘Ilhéus’, and sail more than 500 miles, and there it is not only the study of the course and seeing alternative ports, but also the linking of that chart with the weather, whether it is blowing from here or there, what places are my shelters, right?
So, the nautical chart makes sense from the weather, an anchorage can be a shelter or it can be a trap. You get into a bay that you can’t get out of, with a leeward coast. Well, then meteorology is what ends up giving meaning to any intention of sailing, I always say the same thing, the beauty of sailing, for me everything that is interesting at some point ends up being ambivalent or generates a certain tension, right?
It puts us in tension as human beings and what is this, that sailing implies, if you have to gain courage, because you are going to make strength or you are going to face a force that is obviously stronger than you, isn’t it? which is the ocean and the wind, which are powerful gods, Poseidon, Aeolus, they are not voluptuous, so let’s say you have to become strong and you have to become intelligent, you have to study, you have to make an effort, etc. You have to become great, but on the other hand it teaches you humility because you will never be greater than the sea, right?
Always, if you think you are bigger than the sea, it will give you a lesson in humility. So, well, that’s what I think about meteorology: it’s a powerful god, and if you’re going to need it or be at its mercy, you’d better know or believe that you know what you’re doing.
Coni, have you ever had a rough time or a storm at sea or at anchor?.
So we went through several storms, difficult moments, there was one in particular that has a chapter in the book, called ‘The storm’, because it made me think about the responsibility we had. I think that taking children on a boat gives you an extra responsibility, and I think that’s why a lot of families don’t do it, don’t they?
I think that’s the hardest thing. If you ask me what is the most difficult thing about living on a boat, I think it’s the responsibility of taking your children to an environment that they are not used to and that can sometimes be complicated and, well, no more dangerous than living in the city or living anywhere else.
There was a time when we were sailing, it was a 4-day sailing and we were coming up the coast of Brazil with fronts, with south winds that come with storms, which are strong winds. We were doing that when a clandestine fishing net got tangled in the rudder and in the propeller of the engine, and we couldn’t get out.
When we go to see exactly where we were, we were in front of Cape San Tomé, where there was a lot of waves and a lot of sunken ships, and when we see the situation and we are analysing whether to cut the net or how we are going to get out of it, it was 2 o’clock in the morning, I look inside and on the starboard bunk bed Uli is asleep wrapped in cushions under the red light of the cabin and there I said: ‘Wow, what am I doing? How did I get in here, and how did I get my son who has no guilt or desire to be here, suddenly he would rather be in a house with his grandparents and go to the garden.
Then we went out, we hoisted all the sail, we took advantage of a gale and we dragged that net about 100 miles further, something like that, we spent a whole day dragging that net that we could only get it out when we got to port, but that’s the thing about storms, you have to know they exist, you have to try to avoid them when you can avoid them or take advantage of them when you can take advantage of them, but always be cautious, especially if you go with children, right? It really changed our attitude as sailors, before and after the kids.
Looking ahead, what are your plans for 2023 and further into the future?
In terms of planning for the future, we never set out, at first due to force majeure, because the trip was going to be part of a one-year leave of absence from our jobs, so that forced us to plan everything in one year.
Then what happened was that we left having resigned, but we had a sort of scheme, we had proposed to get from Florianópolis to Búzios within a year, we started there and we quickly realised that we wanted to continue, and we already had a new carrot which was Bahia, we wanted to get to Bahia and well, it’s like the thing is projecting itself forwards. We decided never to do too much planning.
At one time we planned year by year, we would say this year we are going to do such and such a thing and now if I am completely honest I would say that we don’t plan anything, because we only ask ourselves where we want to be.
The other day I was thinking about this, you saw that they say that what it is all about is to be at the right time in the right place, well we asked ourselves what is the right place or what we think is the right place for us, what the family, the kids, us, what is needed, nature, city, family, adventure, another religion, another language, we want to expose the kids to another language, that they learn it as they both already know Portuguese.
Well, the question is: where do I want to be, and we realised that you just have to wait for the right moment, for the right opportunity. Here a piece of land appeared in a place we could never have dreamed of being in Buenos Aires. The journey has been taking us to new places all the time.
My teacher always says that sailing is like being on the lookout, you set the boat to the sound of the sea, you prepare the crew, you study and in the end the weather determines the moment to set sail. Here it’s the same, we try to understand ourselves, to know what we want, what we need, where we want to be, where we want to travel, in what way, right?
We set out to do that, to see where we want to be, and to be attentive, to open our eyes and ears to the opportunities that life gives us, so honestly the boats offer so many opportunities and travel as well, the internet, the networks, that we honestly have no idea what we are going to do, that’s the truth.
Now, that’s in relation to short term planning. Long-term planning is where the key is, what we are sure of is that we are going to be travelling for the rest of our lives, we are always going to be looking for that other, brighter shore, that greener meadow, I don’t know, that thing that you want to go and see that you don’t know, instilling that desire for adventure in the kids to learn, and to be travelling as a family, together, that’s what it is.
You can follow the experiences of ‘El barco Amarillo’ on social networks:
From ‘Bluewater Sailors’ we sincerely thank Coni and Juan for their collaboration in this exciting interview. They are an example of family life on board for many, and in full contact with nature.
We wish you the best of luck in your next projects, and we will follow you in the social networks!
