What does childhood look like when your playground is the open ocean? Imagine tiny hands navigating salt-sprayed decks, lullabies sung to the rhythm of waves, and lessons taught not in classrooms but amid icebergs and coral reefs. For the Schwörer family, growing up aboard the 15-metre aluminium yacht Pachamama has been a lifetime of learning, adventure, and purpose.
In 1999, climatologist and mountain guide Dario Schwörer and former nurse Sabine set sail on what was planned to be a four-year exploration. Their goal? To navigate the world's seas and climb its highest peaks using only human energy and renewable power. Two decades later, the journey transformed into a global mission: sailing over 100,000 nautical miles, educating hundreds of thousands of children, integrating scientific research, and raising six children born at sea. If their lives were a tapestry, the threads would be woven from the ferocity of storms, the hush of polar surroundings, and the steady hum of solar panels aboard Pachamama. In 2016, the family became the first to complete the eastbound Northwest Passage aboard their modest sloop, an achievement that underscored the urgency of climate change’s Arctic implications. Onboard, they’ve gathered eDNA samples, microplastics, and climate data, contributing to research in far-flung polar zones.
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But beyond the data and mountains, the heart of this story beats in the children, like Salina, who said simply: “Sometimes it’s exciting … sometimes boring. It’s a beautiful life.” Those words strike at the core: life aboard isn’t a Netflix reel—it’s a raw, beautiful blend of wonder, monotony, risk, joy, and learning. Their home, 20 square metres of shifting wood and solar-powered instruments, doubles as a lab and a classroom. Homeschooling takes on new meaning when lessons include wind patterns, ice melt, kayak navigation, and coral reef ecosystems. Clean-ups, presentations in schools, and evening jam sessions aboard bridge the worlds they leave and enter. There’s magic in how the family balances the breathtaking and the banal: birthing children in Argentina, Chile, Australia, Singapore, sometimes even Greenland, each umbilical cord clipped with a Swiss Army knife, sealing the symbolic bond with adaptability and ingenuity. Sponsorships from Victorinox, once born of necessity, now echo that metaphorical bond between resilience, family, and purpose.
Picture this: a cramped cabin at dawn, the youngest stirring as Dario secures a climb-kite, Sabine prepares nourishing porridge, and a school lesson begins under porthole light. Then, as the sun dips low, the family gathers on deck, siblings strum guitars, stories flow in different accents, and the ocean becomes both their stage and their teacher. This is not ordinary life. This is growing up aboard Pachamama, an immersive life in motion, where horizons are endless and learning never anchors. Could you live like this? Perhaps not. But through their story, you feel the pull of endless wonder, of childhood unmoored from walls and rooted in the world. That is the power of this journey, to awaken in all of us a deeper belonging to the planet we share.
