Chapter 1: How we moved from life in a Caravan to life on a Yacht?

Written by Yifat Shamir with AHOY! Insurance

Or in short, how we went from this:

To this:

In order to explain, let me start off with telling you a bit about myself:

My name is Yifat, I’m 28 years old, and for the past ten years I’ve been living and breathing the sea. It all started in the military, when I enlisted in the Israeli navy to a unit called Snapir (and later on continued to serve in the Navy’s scuba unit) and simply fell in love. Everything felt so natural - the sailing, the diving, I didn’t want it to ever stop.

So I kept going. After a year and a half of traveling around the world, I came back to Israel with one goal in mind - I’m going to be a scuba instructor. And that’s what happened - I moved to Eilat (the most southern city in Israel on the coast of the Red Sea) for six months, got trained as a scuba instructor, and went on to work at a diving school in the city. That’s also where I met Tomer, the love of my life, who’s been with me in this journey to this day. I guess you can say that’s where it all started.

While working at the diving club, I went crazy with curiosity - what am I seeing underwater? Why is it like this? I felt that I needed to learn a bit about this place that I love so much. That’s when I decided to move onto the next stop - the institute for Marine Science in Mikhmoret, where I got my BA in Marine Biology. The degree was a dream come true. Good people, huge amounts of knowledge in the field, and an extra bonus - a Skipper Course built into the study program. For three years I breathed the ocean every chance I got - whether it was studying about it in class, diving in it, or surfing on it. I was truly addicted.

After graduating I felt that I needed to travel some more, preferably by the sea, and I had this one big dream in mind - crossing the Atlantic ocean. So I began searching for ways to join a cruze, talking with people, writing on forums, and finally I found a ride (who eventually blew me off last minute!) But I didn't let it break my spirit and I decided to live out a different dream. I travelled to the Philippines and did Kite Surfing for three whole months.

Coming back from my trip I wanted to study some more, so I got my Master’s degree studying the shores of the Sdot Yam coastal region (located in the center of Israel, along the Mediterranean Sea). This was another two years spent in the Haifa university, during which Tomer and I lived in a caravan. When I come to think about it, the caravan was the first turning point on the road to where we are today.

The caravan was in fact Tomer’s dream. I forgot to mention before but Tomer is a mechanical engineer, extremely talented and gifted with hands of gold. At first he wanted to buy a van and turn it into a home, but after doing some digging we decided we wanted to buy an antique. Our first home we found in Switzerland. We travelled there and brought it with us back to Israel.

We lived in it for two years. At a certain point we found our way to a horse farm near a tiny beach town in the north of the country, though we never fully got to enjoy it there. Traveling back and forth to work or school prevented us from truly experiencing the paradise we were living in.

And then came Covid and completely reshuffled the cards for us. Tomer got an unpaid leave from work, and we finally got some time off to enjoy the life we have chosen. We planted a vegetable garden, and even built a free-range chicken coop. Kiddo, our dog, served as a herd dog for the hens.

In fact, we suddenly realized we had a whole natural reserve just for ourselves. The transition was sudden. We found ourselves isolated, cut off from the rest of the world, in this amazing bubble, a direct passage to our private beach, surfing all day long, working in our garden (oh yeah, and sometimes studying a bit).

It was at that moment that the dream started coming together. We felt awakened. We began to ask ourselves - where was this life all along? Why couldn’t we, up until this moment when it was forced upon us to take a time-out, decide for ourselves to take it easy and simply - rest? To focus our lives on the simple things close to nature.

The dream continued and at a certain point we decided we wanted to travel (after all, at this point any traveling we did was still 1,000 meters from home), and we had the happiest two months of traveling around our magnificent country, meeting the good people who live in it, and mostly exploring this new way of simple and humble life we had become addicted to. Our caravan took us everywhere - south, north, east, all over the country. In the dry desert or along the Sea of Galilee, up in the mountains or down by the dead sea, there isn’t a corner of the country we didn’t reach. We all (including Kiddo by the way) started getting used to life on the move. No permanent home. Everything is temporary, and home is wherever we were, every day with a different view out the window (well actually, out the windshield). The only downside was the water. We carried a 200 Liter tank of freshwater and we needed it for drinking, showering, dishes and basically almost everything. We would fill the tank every two days or so. In terms of electricity we were pretty independent since we had solar panels and a quite sophisticated system (without AC though).

Living in the caravan definitely got us going. However, this lifestyle, especially in our small and crowded country, had some issues. After two years of traveling all over, we slowly began to realise that maybe the land borders, especially of our tiny country, are just not wide enough for us. It started with the authorities closing down our beach. I won’t get into the reasons behind it, but we felt haunted. There were almost no places alongside the beach where we were allowed to sleep. Other places we either had to pay or we weren’t allowed to even enter. We had envisioned this perfect and untouched natural world, completely cut off from all civilization, and instead we kept getting faced with difficulties and challenges. Even when we did want to stay somewhere rather permanent, there were issues. Basically, anywhere we went we got turned down.

Of course, this was an amazing experience. Still, I never forgot my long life dream of crossing the ocean and seeing the world. Once every few months I would remind Tomer that one day we’re going to make that dream come true, and that would be the next step after the caravan.

So finally we decided - onto the next dream!

How did we do it?

Find out in our next post.