Living Lightly on the Sea: Annie Hill and Trevor Robertson

Summary: Interview with Annie Hill and Trevor Robertson, long distance cruising sailors who have demonstrated that hardly anyone leaves a smaller ecological footprint. An ocean crossing sailboat has to be self-sufficient for weeks on end, conserving water, generating its own electricity, often doing without refrigeration, traveling between continents using no fossil fuel at all. Even within these stringent circumstances of course, there are wastrels and conservers. And the most famous cruising conserver, hands down, is Annie Hill, author of Voyaging on a Small Income. She has spent her entire adult life living richly and inexpensively at sea, in ports from Greenland to New Zealand, from Africa to Australia. She lived and cruised for years on an income of less than 50 a week. For Hill, the key to a good life is freedom. The key to freedom is good financial management and reducing one's expenditures is easier and less entangling than increasing one's income. Her husband, Trevor Robertson, shares her values and has also spent almost all his life cruising on a steel sailboat named Iron Bark, which he built himself in his native Australia. He is the only cruiser in history to have over wintered, frozen in the ice, in both the Arctic and the Antarctic and in the same boat. Between them, Hill and Robertson have sailed more than 300,000 ocean miles. They were married in Nova Scotia in 2003 and in 2010 they were jointly awarded the highest accolade in the sailing world: The Bluewater Medal of the Cruising Club of America.