Unreachable No More: Solitude, Now with Unlimited Data

I feel like I’m one of the lucky ones—part of the last wave of sailors who shoved off to circumnavigate before Starlink rewired the whole game. For the first year and a half, my boat sailed without the internet. My only contact with land was the occasional SMS or email through my Iridium Go or Garmin inReach. No Netflix. No Instagram. No Facebook. No news feeds. Just me, the ocean, and whatever thoughts decided to keep me company. And since I was single‑handed most of the time, it really was just me, alone on the boat, in a silence that felt like a monk’s retreat one moment and solitary confinement the next.

It took some serious unwinding. When I left America, I was practically welded to my iPhone and laptop—as a commercial editor, I always had a glowing screen in front of me. If I wasn’t working, I was streaming, scrolling, clicking—always online. But once I left Mexico for French Polynesia, that umbilical cord snapped. Twenty days across the Pacific to the Marquesas—a jolt to the system. Then ninety days on island time, I started to detox. Slowly, I learned how to walk around without clutching a phone like it was an extra limb, how to sit with nothing but the sound of waves and the wind in the rigging. It felt bizarrely peaceful—like stumbling onto starlight in a world addicted to neon signs.

Then Starlink arrived in Indonesia like Zeus chucking a lightning bolt straight into my cockpit and flipped the whole voyage on its head overnight. Suddenly, I had high‑speed internet on the boat, anywhere on the planet. Game over. Or maybe game on. Either way, it was a revolution. Safety, navigation, comms, weather, research, education, repairs, entertainment—it all leveled up. Most importantly, it meant I could work from literally anywhere, turning this trip from a “someday I’ll go home” adventure into an open‑ended odyssey.

Of course, every gift from the tech gods comes with a curse. The dark side of Starlink? Sliding back into doom‑scrolling, algorithm hypnosis, and the twitch to refresh Facebook or Instagram. Little dopamine jolts drip‑feed my addict brain. Suddenly, you’re not just checking the weather—you’re checking everything. It’s like sea spray on a stormy night: constant, stinging, impossible to escape.

Yes, in theory the fix is simple: just don’t open your phone. But for some folks, that’s like telling an alcoholic to sip the beer—now five years sober, I can tell you how difficult that was—or asking someone with ADD to sit still and meditate. Starlink isn’t just a tool—it’s a test of will. Out here, the struggle to unplug looks different for everyone. I’m not sure where I fit into all that, but I think about it from time to time.

In the last four years of sailing around the world, I’ve met sailors in both camps. Some see Starlink as an abomination that ruins the purity of the trip. Others believe the safety alone makes it worth the compromise. Much of that divide comes down to generational differences: some prefer to stay analogue and be left alone, while others need connectivity to make this dream possible. My humble opinion is simple— to each their own; there’s no right or wrong answer.

Either way life out here is still absurdly, ridiculously beautiful—just not the same as it was. It’s like trading handwritten love letters for emojis. The ocean hasn’t changed, but the soundtrack has.