Unmoored by Design: Reimagining Life, Work & Family on the Water
Janna Cawrse Esarey ’94 and Graeme Esarey ’92 find purpose, creativity and togetherness living and adventuring at sea
By Tara Roberts
Photography by Lizzett Zaragosa ’27
Embracing the seas of change. Since they met at Whitman College in 1990, entrepreneur Graeme Esarey ’92 and writer Janna Cawrse Esarey ’94 have made an art of balancing career exploration and innovation with epic adventures at sea.
When adventure calls, Janna Cawrse Esarey ’94 and Graeme Esarey ’92, have built a life that allows them to answer.
From a honeymoon sailing the Pacific to an epic Arctic journey with their young daughters to moving onto an old wooden boat with teenagers, the couple has embraced upending their lives and careers on land to pursue new adventures.
For Janna and Graeme, navigating big changes in location or vocation is exciting. They call themselves “sabbaticalists.”
“We believe in working hard and, when the time is right, shifting focus and doing something different,” Janna says.
This approach has allowed them to pursue their creative and entrepreneurial passions while bonding with their family and the planet. Currently, Janna is a writer whose day job driving a school bus gives her time for her craft. Graeme is the Founder and CEO of Ignik Outdoors, which makes sustainable outdoor gear (see “Warmer Adventures, Cleaner Oceans” below).
Their courage to do things differently is rooted in their experiences at Whitman, where they met in 1990. The two were involved in athletics and the Outdoor Program, and especially loved the pre-semester experiences then known as Scrambles: Janna and a friend once led a group of seven first-year men on a backpacking trip on Mount Hood, and Graeme was a river rafting guide.
“Whitman put us in pretty interesting places as young adults—quite literally a sink-or-swim moment or two in there,” Graeme says. “Not every college gives you that sort of opportunity.”
Their liberal arts education gave depth to their experiences—past and present—and helped shape their mindsets.
“Whitman taught us how to think, how to analyze, how to problem-solve,” Janna says. “The thing about boats is stuff breaks all the time. To have a grand adventure, which sounds so fun and carefree, the truth is you need to be able to solve problems, to seek resources wherever you are.”
“Whitman put us in pretty interesting places as young adults … Not every college gives you that sort of opportunity.
”
—Graeme Esarey ’92
A Family Expedition
Janna and Graeme met over a pool table in the basement of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Whitman, but their love story ebbed and flowed for a decade, until they married in 2003.
They celebrated by leaving their jobs—Janna as an English teacher, Graeme as Director of Operations for a boutique building products company—for a two-year honeymoon traversing the Pacific by sailboat. The two had grown up boating with their families, but the long-term experience was a wild way to start their lives together.
At sea, Janna discovered she had the time to write that she’d always dreamed of. She chronicled the trip in her memoir, “The Motion of the Ocean: 1 Small Boat, 2 Average Lovers, and a Woman’s Search for the Meaning of Wife,” published by Simon & Schuster in 2009.
After that epic trip, the couple settled back on land for a while, and their daughters, Talia and Savai, were born. As the girls grew up, Janna and Graeme kept thinking about the families they met during their first big adventure.
“The kids we met on boats were the coolest kids. They were capable. They could befriend anyone of any age. They were citizens of the world,” Janna says. “And we thought, ‘We want our kids to have that kind of experience.’”
They set an audacious goal of sailing the Northwest Passage, crossing the Arctic from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Graeme was thrilled at the idea of going someplace they’d never been and where few go at all.
“You think about the number of people who’ve climbed Everest, and they’re in the thousands. The number of boats that have completed the Northwest Passage is maybe a few hundred,” he says.
They started to strategize how to rearrange their careers and finances. At the time, Graeme was president of an outdoor gear company and was tired of his long commute and busy days. Janna’s writing could come to sea with them—and her stories about issues like work-life balance and shared parenting for Third Path Institute, a national nonprofit, were particularly on-theme.
Their daughters, then 9 and 12, helped them prepare a retired racing sailboat called Dogbark for the journey. The whole family began blogging about the experience for their website, saildogbark.com.
They set sail in June 2018, heading north.
All aboard. Time on the water has played a pivotal part in the lives of Janna Cawrse Esarey ’94 and Graeme Esarey ’92—from their first years of marriage to raising a family to how they envision the next phase of their lives. Top left: Janna and Graeme in the Pacific Ocean on passage from the Galapagos to the Marquesas during their honeymoon in 2004. (Photo courtesy of Chris Miles.) Top right: Janna, Graeme and their family now make their home on Ranger, a wooden powerboat docked on Bainbridge Island, Washington. (Photo courtesy of Janna Cawrse Esarey.) Bottom left: Talia (12) and Savai (9) stand on a “bergy bit” (a term for a small iceberg) with Dogbark in the background in 2018. (Photo courtesy of Janna Cawrse Esarey.) Bottom right: Savai stands in the bow of the boat on the lookout for ice in the water. (Photo courtesy of Janna Cawrse Esarey.)
Learning in the Arctic
The Arctic trip wasn’t just about adventure—it was about learning and growing as a family.
Graeme’s parents, Jon and Vickie, joined the first leg of the trip. The three generations shared stories as they visited the Alaskan waters where Jon had owned commercial fishing boats and Graeme grew up among the fleet.
In Sitka, Alaska, Graeme stayed aboard with a crew of friends while the rest of the family disembarked. Janna, Talia and Savai later reunited with Dogbark in Nome, Alaska, less than 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
For most of human history, it’s been impossible to navigate the Arctic in a single season. But as climate change melts sea ice, boats can pass north of Alaska, through the islands of northern Canada and around the southern tip of Greenland to the Atlantic, and vice versa.
It was important to Janna and Graeme for their daughters to understand how climate change was reshaping the waters they sailed.
“These are the problems that their generation is going to have to deal with,” Janna says. “The people who have to fix it had better understand it, and if they have experienced it firsthand, so much the better,” Graeme adds.
The girls experienced not only the Arctic, but also climate science itself: A group of scientists crossing the Arctic from the Atlantic enlisted Talia and Savai to record daily weather and water readings on the Pacific side.
The family stayed in the Arctic for a month and a half before their goal of traversing the Northwest Passage was thwarted by storm-driven heavy ice in the Franklin Strait, north of Nunavut, the northernmost territory of Canada.
The Canadian Coast Guard warned Dogbark that they were heading out for the winter. If Dogbark didn’t want to spend the winter stuck in the ice, it was time to go home.
As the family and crew processed this difficult news amid the frozen landscape, 12-year-old Talia had an idea: Why not follow the traditional whalers’ route and head to Lahaina on Maui?
They reached Hawai‘i about 20 days later.
“I definitely remember pulling into that wonderful anchorage where you’ve got Molokai on one side, Lanai directly across from you, Big Island south of you, and Maui right next to you,” Graeme says. “You just think, ‘Wow, this is a pretty fine place to be after being in the ice for a while.’”
One of their first stops, Janna remembers, was a thrift store. They’d packed plenty of cozy layers, but no shorts or flip-flops.
“There are so many ways to live a life. … Exploring how to tweak, how to shift, how to grow in a different direction—that’s the kind of stuff that really excites me.
”
—Janna Cawrse Esarey ’94
Resilient, Creative Lives
The months in the Arctic and Pacific were formative for the entire family. While the girls sometimes wished they could be part of a “normal” family when they were younger, they’ve since gained an appreciation for their epic adventure and the resilience it gave them. (Talia, now 19, is still a sailor; Savai, now 17, is a runner.)
Janna knows their family is lucky to have been able to have these kinds of experiences.
“We’ve got lots of memories, lots of stories, and time spent together that, when you have a workaday existence, you just don’t get,” she says.
Graeme founded Ignik shortly after they returned home, and he credits the Arctic expedition not only with inspiring his products, but also with giving him the freedom to be creative.
“My most productive, inspired, epiphany moments were after I quit my job and freed my mind to do things,” he says.
Janna also discovered the power of being released from expectations. She never anticipated being a school bus driver, but she’s embraced the community and flexibility it gives her.
“There are so many ways to live a life,” she says. “Sometimes we get in these ruts, and we forget that, really, people live lots of lives in lots of different ways. Exploring how to tweak, how to shift, how to grow in a different direction—that’s the kind of stuff that really excites me.”
Graeme—who completed the Northwest Passage with another crew on Dogbark in 2024—says he encourages others to think about sabbaticalism as more than just taking an adventure.
“For me, it’s creating the sort of blue-ocean space to do really good thinking about what you want to have happen next in your life,” he says. “I’ve always come back from these jaunts inspired and driven to do something. I think if people give themselves the freedom to do that, they will learn and grow as a result.”
Charting a New Course
In spring 2022, Janna and Graeme decided it was time to leave life on land again. They missed the community, sense of adventure and closeness to nature they found on the water.
This time they moved onto a wooden powerboat docked on Bainbridge Island, Washington, with their daughters. The move was a way to keep one foot on shore and one foot at sea during the girls’ final teenage years.
The boat is old and funky, but there are windows to let in the light, space for art and homey touches, more bathrooms than they had in their house—and way more space than they had the last few times they lived aboard a boat.
Today, Janna and Graeme know they’re nearing a new phase of life. Their parents are aging, and their daughters are heading into adulthood. But they’re together on the water, surrounded by community, doing things they love with a mindset that offers endless possibilities.
They’re ready for whatever new adventures the future holds.
Warmer Adventures, Cleaner Oceans: The Story of Ignik Outdoors
On their family’s 2018 trip into the Arctic, the two youngest crew members’ job aboard Dogbark was to stand on the bow of the boat, toes hanging over the water as they spotted passageways through the ice. Talia and Savai Esarey would wave their hands to port or starboard to signal safe routes.
To keep those hands warm, the boat carried cases of disposable hand warmers. But about half of them failed.
“They’re in plastic packaging; there is nothing you can do with them except pack it all back up and sail 5,000 miles and take it to Hawai‘i to the nearest garbage can,” says Graeme Esarey ’92. “As someone who is a product entrepreneur, the idea that this was the best we could do as outdoor people was frustrating to me.”
Another epiphany hit Graeme as they spotted rusted-out one-pound propane cylinders littering the Alaskan coast.
He was determined to find better solutions for keeping people warm, even in the most remote parts of the world. He launched Ignik Outdoors in 2019.
Their initial products—now found in 2,500 stores in the United States and Canada and online—included compostable hand warmers and refillable propane tanks. Recently, they introduced an electric hand warmer that can replace hundreds of disposable ones.
“One of our missions is to see if we can get the 100 million or so disposable hand warmers that are going to landfills out of the backcountry,” Graeme says.
He’d love to have Whitman students join the team: “If there are any outdoor-oriented product geeks who need internships, feel free to reach out.” He welcomes emails at graeme@ignik.com.
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