Our writer was on a “romantic” sailing trip when COVID hit. When she found out her boyfriend might be cheating on her, she could not go home.
I was on the 3 to 6 a.m. night watch—the stretch of hours on the boat that belonged only to me—when I came across the photos. Women in bikinis on the boat right where I was sitting. The same pose every time—them in the foreground, my boyfriend grinning at the wheel behind them, proud to be with whichever beautiful woman was in the picture.
There were even some nudes. One woman had visited him three times. The locations were labeled Bahamas, Bonaire, Panama. Panama, the very place he’d flown me after inviting me on this sailing passage. Was I even special to him at all? Or was I just the idiot who got stuck with him on this trip? A pit formed in my stomach as I realized there was nowhere to go except back to the V-berth bed at the bow of the boat, next to him.
We had 20 days left until we reached land.
We’d met when he lived across the street from me in Austin, before I moved out to LA to pursue my acting dreams. He was 21 years older and had a way of making my problems disappear with a solution and a plane ticket. We had been on and off for five years by the time he invited me to sail from Panama to French Polynesia—a “quick” three to four week trip, he promised, across a stretch of ocean a quarter of the way around the globe.
Once he convinced me to join him, he bought me a camera so I could document our adventure. He knew I was always looking for my next creative endeavor, and having a project to work on as we sailed would make me feel less like I was missing out on opportunities in LA. I had never made a documentary before; the idea of it equally thrilled and terrified me.
I agreed to get on the boat, despite the uncertainty I had about our future. He told me there was no one he’d rather do this with than me—and I believed him. He was going to keep sailing the rest of the way around the world, and I would go back to LA once we reached French Polynesia.
I should have sensed something was off before we even left the dock. The night I flew in to join him and the three-person crew in Panama, I lay in bed waiting for him to come to me. I was looking forward to lying in his arms and reconnecting after a month apart, but he was up top smoking with his first mate. The following night, he didn’t come back before I fell asleep at all.
“Either start paying attention to me, or buy me a ticket home,” I told him. He reassured me that he would and that he wanted me to be there with him.
We motored out of the marina on March 7, 2020. One week later, an email came through on the satellite connection: Coronavirus had broken out across the world. Borders were slamming shut everywhere, including the islands we were sailing toward. We didn’t know it yet, but we’d just lost our exit.
There was no getting off that boat. Not for three more weeks to the Marquesas Islands, and then, when French Polynesia wouldn’t let us land, not for another 16 days as we headed for Hawaii. At that point, it was just the two of us—our crew departed for Tahiti on another boat. I had to learn how to sail and pull my weight very quickly. With just the two of us, we had to be on constant watch. I would stand watch for as long as I was able while he slept, then climb into bed while he took over for as long as he could last.
Five degrees north of the equator, we entered the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a notoriously unpredictable band of weather. The squalls were intense; one night, it was so bad that the ship heeled over at a 45-degree angle and the cabin windows were submerged underwater. We made it through a fishing fleet stringing five miles of steel cable across our path in the dark. Once it finally seemed like smooth sailing, our autopilot failed with 800 miles of open ocean still ahead of us, forcing him to hand-wire it back to life while I held our course by compass alone. I sobbed with relief when the little screen blinked back on. We could finally breathe again.
That is, until the fighting started. I kept the photos of the other women to myself for as long as I could, but eventually confronted him about them. At first, he reassured me, saying I should trust him. But after hearing that his friends had compared me to one of the women, my insecurities took over. When I demanded answers, he shut down completely, and we stopped speaking except to hand off watch shifts.
He would come up into the cockpit, and I would tell him the wind speed in case he wanted to reef the sails. He would mumble a perfunctory “thank you” as I went below to record the coordinates, course over ground, and nautical miles traveled in the ship’s logbook. This continued for days.
We were two people avoiding each other inside 47 feet of fiberglass. There was no door to walk out of and no friend’s couch to sleep on. I felt trapped and powerless. My need to resolve conflict right away was crushed against his giant stone wall. I eventually couldn’t take it anymore.
I took the satellite phone out on deck to call my mom, but he came up from below to intercept me—not to comfort me, but to tell me it was too dangerous to sit there without a life jacket. I felt like someone who’d escaped her captor only to round the corner and find him there again.
I put on a life jacket, then made the call. My mom, thousands of miles and a five-second satellite delay away, told me to forgive him. I didn’t have a lot of other options. I was a captive out there, water in every direction, and forgiveness was the only currency I had left to spend. I came back below and gently asked him if we could talk. When he agreed, I broke down in tears as I admitted my insecurities about his feelings for me. He reassured me that he wanted me, not her. I melted into his chest and willed myself to believe him. I had to in order to survive.
Forty-nine days after leaving Panama, we finally motored into a marina in Honolulu, where strangers were waiting on the dock with leis and cold beer. I thought: We made it, this is where it gets to be good again.
It lasted about 20 minutes. I couldn’t get my land legs back—I hadn’t stood on anything that wasn’t moving in seven weeks—and every time I reached for my boyfriend to steady myself, he peeled off to go talk to someone else. I saw him chatting with two strangers in their 20s, attempting to score weed and cigarettes.
I went back to the boat and started throwing pillows. I was so mad, but determined not to cause any actual damage in my rage. I didn’t want to hurt the boat that had safely carried us to land. He eventually came back, but he felt miles away. I followed him out to the front of the boat, where he was drinking his fifth or sixth beer since landing. I still loved him and desperately wanted things to be OK between us, but my attempts to connect were only making things worse.
By that night, he was screaming at me to get out of the crew cabin, telling me that he didn’t want to see “my fucking face” while slamming a door in it. I sat on the floor outside and cried into a kitchen towel until I couldn’t anymore. Later, lying in the dark on opposite sides of the boat, my phone lit up with a text from 20 feet away. He wanted to know how much he owed me for my time on the trip. Like I’d been on the clock. Like five years and an ocean crossing came down to an invoice.
We stayed together through the 14 days of quarantine that followed—there was, once again, nowhere else for either of us to go. We found ways to pass the time with approved activities—watching the sunset from the dinghy, going to the emergency dentist, pretending at a normal life while discovering the world was anything but normal—but I was so tired of being on that boat that I asked him to rent us a house.
I was determined that we could make this work. With more space to breathe, I thought we had a chance. But the relationship only continued to unravel as we struggled to make sense of everything going on around us. We started fighting about COVID, the presidential election, and the protests breaking out across the country. The world felt so polarized, and so did we. He embraced the COVID restrictions, while I questioned their consistency, where the lines should be drawn, and why. Inside this pressure cooker, we began to drift farther and farther apart.
It didn’t help when I discovered he had been reaching out to another woman. I asked him how he could do that so quickly, just 30 minutes after a fight. He stared at me and replied, “I could replace you in five seconds.” That was a bright red flag waving in the wind. But I didn’t yet recognize the codependent patterns that were keeping me trapped in this unhealthy relationship. I was scared to leave him after everything we had been through together, especially with the future so uncertain. He made the decision easier when he eventually broke up with me a few nights later.
I went for a walk on the beach to process the end of it. Suddenly, it started pouring. A 500-pound weight that had been on my back for months rolled off me as I danced in the rain. I looked out over the ocean and saw a moonbow for the first time in my life. I took off my clothes and baptized myself in the Pacific. I was finally free.
Within days of my return to LA, he was emailing me late into the night: drunk, cruel, and specific in the way only someone who used to love you can be. Insults about my looks, my finances, my sexuality, my beliefs. Threats that I had no rights to the footage I had filmed for my documentary, which had taken a very different turn and which I now planned to call Quarantine at Sea.
One email in particular stopped me in my tracks. The subject line simply read: “Title Change.” I opened up the email, and the words hit me like a gut punch: I changed the title from “Quarantine at Sea” to “Worst Tits Ever.” Much better…
I had to read it again. And then another time to fully absorb his cruelty. He must want to hurt me so badly, I thought. I looked down at my boobs, suddenly very self-conscious of them. Did he really think they were the worst he’d ever seen?
It wasn’t until months later, during a late-night writing session while working on my memoir, that those words replayed in my head: Worst Tits Ever. It finally landed. That’s the title of my book! I went into the Word doc and renamed the file.
After moving back to my parents’ house in Texas to ride out the pandemic, it took me months of therapy before I was able to completely unravel myself from him. I had Cinderella Syndrome before getting on that boat. I was waiting for someone else to come along and hand me an opportunity to get my life started.
In a way, my ex had done just that.
I had become completely dependent on him, down to how I viewed myself. I needed to reclaim my voice, and I did so by writing everything down—everything that happened out there.
Not just the story of being stuck on a sailboat at the outbreak of COVID, but the slow unraveling of a relationship that had meant everything to me. The painful insults and threats when the relationship ended. The messy legal dispute when he had his lawyer come after me, claiming I had no rights to distribute the documentary. I stayed up until 4 a.m. many nights writing, and a new layer of my heart healed with each chapter I completed.
Now, Worst Tits Ever sits on my shelf, and it is so much more than my first published book. It reminds me of how far I had to go to stop seeing myself through someone else’s eyes. Writing it helped me take back my voice, my body, and my confidence. For the first time, I wasn’t waiting for someone else to come along and start my life for me. I did it myself.
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