Engineers sail nearly 20,000 nautical miles across the world

Read more about this three-year sailing trip on the Slice of MIT blog: https://bit.ly/3eTzQv2

In November 2020, Laura Aust ’10 and Alec Marshall wrapped up an extraordinary three-year journey that took them from Croatia to Fiji. Since 2018, they have lived on a sailboat they named after the mindset they craved: Serenity First.

Aust and Marshall were living together in London working as a management consultant (Marshall) and a parts developer for a luxury watch startup (Aust) when they started talking seriously about shaking things up with an extended ocean voyage.

They started by planning their budget and selecting a secondhand boat: a 43-foot Elan Impression 434 (“imagine a big RV except maybe a little fatter and it happens to float and have a really big mast in the middle” is Aust’s prosaic description). Then came the hard work of preparing it for long months at sea, nearly all of which they did themselves. Finally, they set sail, having mapped out a 20,000-nautical-mile itinerary with an end point in Australia.

But to quote one of Aust’s favorite sailing maxims, “All plans are written in sand at low tide.” As they traveled through the Pacific on the final leg of their journey in March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic abruptly transformed the world. In the video, Aust and Marshall reflect on how their three-year odyssey played out its final chapter in the context of a global pandemic, and how the rigors of MIT prepared them for choppy waters.

#massachusettsinstituteoftechnology #sailing #travel #covid

Видео Engineers sail nearly 20,000 nautical miles across the world канала MIT Alumni Association