“When I was planning my transition, your magazine was a great source of comfort to me that even though I might be insane, I wasn’t the only one in the asylum.”
— Jillian Simensky

About Us

Living Aboard magazine is about making dreams come true. It’s about leaving the confines of daily life and looking at the world from a new perspective — and it’s about living aboard a boat. If that’s a crazy idea, then this is also a magazine about crazy people. Here you meet folks who rearranged their daily lives to live and travel on their boats. You read, in their own words, how they fulfilled a dream many share. For anyone who hopes to someday do Something Else, their stories are interesting, informative and inspiring.

For nearly 30 years, Living Aboard magazine has been a community forum for liveaboards — a place where people who are living their dream on the water can exchange information, share experiences and work together to preserve the right to live aboard.

The newsletter that grew into Living Aboard was founded in 1973 by Roland and Janice Smith. In 1982, Janice and Roland turned the publication over to George and Maureen Breen followed by Linda Grover and Tom Daughtery in 1985. Michael and Raf Frankel guided development of Living Aboard from 1987 to 1990 when Craig and Lynn Wanous took over. Tim Murray was at the helm from 1993 to 1997 before handing it to Fred Walters, our current publisher. It is a tribute to each of these people that Living Aboard has grown from a newsletter — inspired by the desire of a small group of cruisers to keep in touch with one another — to a magazine that serves liveaboards on four continents and in all 50 states of the U.S. It is still the only magazine dedicated to the liveaboard way of life.

Living Aboard is a reader-written magazine, and the information is truly the voice of experience. Advances in telecommunications made the liveaboard lifestyle more accessible to greater numbers of people — it is now possible for many to work “at home” wherever that may be. With the growth of the Internet homeschooling became an attractive option for parents who may otherwise have waited until the kids were out of school to move aboard. And cruisers have new ways to communicate with the folks back home or, happily, with us here at the magazine. More information, new ways to share it, and more people participating in this unique lifestyle have helped the magazine grow in scope and content.

When the Smiths started Living Aboard magazine in 1973 (then the newsletter of the Homaflote Association) they stated that it was for “mutual benefit through shared experience.” Now, a generation later, that statement still goes to the heart of Living Aboard magazine and is central to its vision and purpose. We are grateful to all who have, over the years, so generously supported the liveaboard community by contributing their knowledge and their experience to the pages of the magazine. We hope that the stories we publish will inspire you to escape from your landlocked mindset — and maybe even help convince your relatives that you aren’t so crazy after all.