After an intense career during which she often chose “work over life,” Lisa Dorenfest is at last, at 57, realizing her dream of circumnavigating the globe on a sailboat. She’s self-funding the trip and finally finding the work-life balance that long eluded her.
Financing the Ultimate Trip
How does one woman take off on a boat to sail around the world at a time when others her age are worrying about retirement? By saving up over time, says Dorenfest. Starting from her first job, Dorenfest was a disciplined saver, following the common wisdom of putting away a part of every paycheck. She had a few stock options, and in addition to contributing to a 401(k), she saved her money in CDs and money market accounts. To finance her current trip, she ultimately also sold her apartment in New York City and added the profit to her savings. “Happily, the cost of cruising has been one-tenth the cost of living in New York City,” Dorenfest says.
Rather than purchase her own sailboat, she opted to start by “crewing”—paying for passages to gain experience. After that, she established her current arrangement, where she shares expenses (e.g., for fuel, food, internet and satellite communications, navigation software and clearance fees) with the captain of Amandla, a sailing yacht. They occasionally take on additional crew members, but predominantly sail the boat “double handed,” meaning just the two of them.
As first mate of Amandla, Dorenfest stands watch while it’s the captain’s turn to sleep, assisting with passage planning, provisioning, small repairs and cleaning the ship. “All important jobs to stay happily afloat,” she says.
Her duties aboard ship are a far cry from her past occupations: As a foreign exchange manager at a bank, a senior manager at a consulting firm and a program director who “lead strategic transformation projects” at her last company. She specialized in regulatory compliance and business development initiatives and helped turn around programs that were underperforming.
Finding Her Sea Legs
This isn’t Dorenfest’s first travel adventure. In 2007, she took a three-month sabbatical from work to drive cross-country and sail along the New England coast with a childhood friend who was “living her bucket list” after a cancer diagnosis. It was during that trip that Dorenfest began seriously considering the possibility of circumnavigating the globe someday.
“I enjoyed traveling and taking in the great outdoors in the comfort of my temporary ‘sailing home,’” she says. “I welcomed the simplicity of sailing, needing only to take along the essentials, leaving everything superfluous behind. I felt a meditative sense of calm and connectedness while on passage. Time would stop. Life was clarified. Everything seemed to make sense. I wanted more of this experience and thus my new dream was formed.”
The first leg of her around-the-world adventure was in 2011. She obtained her Yachtmasters Offshore certification in England and sailed across the Atlantic to Saint Lucia in the annual Atlantic Rally for Cruisers.
Then, in 2012, she returned to work to successfully deliver the biggest project of her career. At its conclusion, she set sail again—this time, with no end date. “At first, I was too fearful to follow my dream,” Dorenfest says. “I thought I would jeopardize the career that I loved and had taken so long to build—and that I could not afford to undertake such an adventure. It was only when the fear of not following my dream became greater than all of my other fears that I decided to lift anchor.”
Around the World in Six Years
Dorenfest joined Amandla as first mate in Mexico. When she first met the captain, he’d been sailing in the Mediterranean and Caribbean for several years and was looking for new adventures. His plan was to sail across the Pacific but, in the end, gave Dorenfest her desire: an around-the-world adventure. From Mexico, they’ve traveled across the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal into the South Pacific, on to the Indian Ocean and then around the southern tip of Africa and back into and across the Atlantic.
This second leg of the journey, which they began in 2012, has now lasted nearly six years, with long hiatuses for both her and the captain at various destinations. In Vietnam, for example, Dorenfest took a motorcycle tour of the country for a month and spent another month in Thailand with family. Despite being offered more than one job in her former field along the way, Dorenfest has opted to keep on sailing. Dorenfest has swum with humpback whales in Tonga, danced with grass skirt-clad men in French Polynesia, broken bread with Fijian tribal chiefs, submitted photos to Smithsonian magazine of the Mpanjakavavy of Nosy Mamoko and walked with Komodo dragons and orangutans in Indonesia.
She chronicles her journey on her website, One Ocean at a Time, accompanying stories from her travels with photos she takes herself. Memorializing her trip is purely a labor of love, yet her blog has attracted a wide audience—and additional funding. Her photographs have appeared in Vanity Fair Italy and on msn.com and have been exhibited in galleries in Vermont. “These opportunities haven’t netted me enough cash to make it to my next port—or buy more than a night out on the town, for that matter—but they are a good foundation from which to build a future to support whatever I want to do, if not a traditional job,” Dorenfest says.
Dorenfest will arrive in Panama at the end of the year. It wasn’t the port she departed from, but it’s where she’ll “cross her wake,” in sailing terms, effectively closing the circle and finishing her circumnavigation. As the final date gets closer, she is debating whether to return to the everyday world with standard jobs or to find ways to keep sailing, writing, photographing and blogging—or an entirely new adventure.
Pat Olsen is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Diversity Woman, Family Business, AARP and other outlets.
Inset photo courtesy of Lisa Dorenfest.
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