Sarah lives on a boat, no country, no nation describes her as home anymore. It is probably the most extreme form of emigration. Sarah is happy. Even if she knows that the Mediterranean does not only know joy.
Sarah calls from the sea. The sunlight lights up the small room she is sitting in. Her face is tanned, her teeth are distinctly white, her eyes are bright and restless.
Your house shakes, lies in the waves of the Mediterranean Sea. This house is her country, to which she emigrated. Sarah lives on a boat, has no solid ground under her feet and that’s exactly what she wanted.
“For me, that is absolute freedom,” she says, and her voice sounds so convincing that anyone who speaks to her can have no doubt about it. may have.
Not knowing any country anymore, not describing any nation as one’s home is probably the most extreme form of emigration. Sarah is a sea nomad who floats from port to port with her husband. A life so unusual that not even many people could dream of it.
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“We decided that together,” says Sarah, pointing a finger backwards into space. Her husband walks across the deck while she sits in the cabin, has set himself up in front of the laptop and is talking. Talks about what it means to give up everything, really everything, and set yourself up on a boat. For two.
“The good thing is that my husband and I can work from here,” as a journalist, she writes texts and makes audio recordings. All from this boat. She no longer needs an office, an address she drives to to work with her head. Your head works everywhere.
Leaving Germany behind was not difficult, it was a dream of Sarah. A real one that matured and that dream became a calling, a mission, a purpose.
But she doesn’t live the life most people imagine a boat owner in the Mediterranean to have. Her life is not about enjoying cocktails in Cannes or oysters in Nice. Your life is simple.
“The best thing is when we’re not anchoring in a port,” she says, referring to the feeling of lying off a coast at night, having no contact with land. This means the warm air that blows over the sea into the cabin.
“Then I know I did the right thing.” She emphasizes this clearly because she and her husband often had the feeling that they had made a mistake.
“We both had no idea about boats when we decided to take this step,” and that is a great uncertainty. Boats are actually constantly broken, something always breaks, water comes somewhere. It needs to be painted, screwed and repaired.
“That’s the day’s work, we taught ourselves that,” says Sarah. Half of the day they would work on the boat, the other half they would use to rest or work in the home office. In the floating home office.
Thilo Mischke was born in Berlin in 1981. He works as a journalist, author and TV presenter. He has received numerous awards for his journalistic work, for example he won a Bavarian television prize in 2020 and was named “Journalist of the Year” in the “National Reportage” category.
This freedom is not without danger, Sarah herself has great difficulties finding her way back to real life on land. She got used to this life. And maybe that makes her one of the most unbound people in Europe. No possessions, no obligations, just the boat, the man and the sea.
But this Mediterranean does not only know joy. People die there, drown, are forgotten or thrown into the sea. Sarah gets that. She hears the stories.
It’s the same sea, but the lives couldn’t be more different. People, abandoned in a desperate search for what Sarah left behind: safety.
“We hear the stories, but we’ve never experienced it, we haven’t seen any refugees on the water,” she says. But it bothers her. “I hope I never have to see that,” she says seriously.
If life knows no home port, the big question is what is to come. Your dream has come true. “Not quite,” Sarah admits, is silent for a moment.
“One day we want to cross the Atlantic, to the Caribbean.” In other words, to paradise. Even further away from what was once a homeland: namely Europe.
