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EAGLE MOUNTAIN — Angela Hall gazed out at the blinking lights scattered across the valley during an early morning commute to work from Eagle Mountain. Her mind, occupied with thoughts of family, raced from one idea to the next.
She had been praying with her husband for direction as a couple and family, but felt at a loss and fed up with the typical routine that always seemed to end the same way.
Suddenly, a thought came to her: “Sail as a family.”
Angela Hall laughed it off, sure it was simply the product of a wild mind or a “gypsy compulsion,” as she calls it. But the thought kept coming back, and eventually, it stuck. “Sail as a family."
A few days later, Angela brought it up to her husband, Mark Hall.
“I thought she was crazy. It’s a lot more than ‘a little extreme,’” he said. “At first, she said it and I laughed — a lot — and thought, ‘You are crazy. What are you even talking about?’ We live in Utah, and we don’t sail. It’s not like we come from a big, rich sailing background.”
But it was only a few days later that Mark asked Angela how she thought they could make it happen.
“And just like that, we were both considering a crazy idea,” Angela Hall said.
The couple decided to float the idea by their two teenage daughters, Connley, 14, and Mason, 16. The girls would be a sophomore and junior in high school, respectively, and Mark and Angela were sure abandoning everything to sail around the world as a family was not in the girls’ plans. But they seemed excited.
“I’ve always wanted to travel. My room was travel-themed before we moved out,” Mason Hall said.
Though both girls were nervous about leaving family and friends, the prospect of no school did sound appealing, at least to Connley. Angela Hall was quick to remind her they would still be homeschooling.
Finally, with the consent of the whole family, Mark and Angela began researching.
“After we started looking into it, we found that there are actually several families that do this. So we read their blogs and watched their YouTube videos and tried to glean from them the positives, the negatives, how it affected their kids and how practical it was,” Angela Hall said.
“That’s kind of what sold it for me is seeing that other families had done this and that it had been a positive thing for their families. We thought, ‘You know what, our kids … they’ll be adults and off to college, and that’ll be it. We felt like the timing was now or never.”
The family researched options and decided they would fly to Puerto Rico at the beginning of September where their boat would be waiting for them. Once there, they would spend a few months in Puerto Rico stocking up on provisions and learning how to sail. After hurricane season ended at the end of November, they’d set sail for the Caribbean and return after a year.
“We’re thinking mostly in the beginning, our passages from one island to the next will be just a couple of days,” Mark Hall said. “If we go across the Caribbean Sea, it’ll be closer to a week. We’ll try to keep a week to two weeks of food stocked at all times.”
To finance the adventure, the Halls decided to sell all their belongings, including their house and cars. Several garage sales and one realtor later, it was all gone. They had just enough to finance the journey. It was time to buy the boat.
“The boat (has) two solar panels and wind generators, so it creates its own energy. It will have electric power … and can make fresh water out of the salt water,” Mark Hall said. “Our initial plan is to go south along the island chain … ‘cause the voyages are shorter. … The good thing about them is they cater to a lot of tourist industries. A lot of them have services if there was an issue or if there was a problem.”
Though the family knows the journey is risky, they’re eager for what’s to come.
“I’m most excited for this opportunity for our family to work together and experience something that we wouldn’t be able to experience,” Angela said. “We’re going to have to go into the local towns, meet people, eat their food, fish from local waters, interact with these people and learn their language.”
If all goes well, the next goal is to circumnavigate the globe.
Those interested in the Halls’ adventures can follow them on their blog, Sailing Roanoke.
