THE PROBLEM THAT WON'T LET GO

'The Right Way Out (Part 2)'
Written & Narrated by Duff Archie

​When my dad died, we cleared the house first.

The adjustable bed, the wheelchair, the shower chair, all of it was mostly donated or curbed within a week. We needed the equipment and disease out. You spend years watching a disease take hold in your house, and eventually, you want the house back.

Whether it actually works is a separate question.

It didn’t, entirely. MS has gravity. We removed every physical trace of disease, but sometimes it’s a ghost. It’s in how your family talks, in what you notice on the street, in the silence where a joke used to be. We tried anyway.

Then COVID happened.

It’s 2020, and the world is locked down. I’m on the couch doing what apparently millions of other Americans were also doing that year, discovering boats. More than 800,000 first-time boat buyers entered the market in 2020 and 2021. Boat sales hit a thirteen-year high. The country had collectively decided that if the world was going to end, it might as well end at sea.

I found solace in Sailing YouTube. SV Delos, Sailing La Vagabonde, Sailing Zatara, Sailing Uma, Project Atticus. Crews of regular people documenting ocean crossings, anchoring in turquoise water, fixing diesel engines in foreign ports, building audiences of millions. These were real people turning a boat and a camera into media companies, part of the $250 billion creator economy, whether they knew it or not.

At the time, OffWeGo, the travel-risk startup I’d co-founded and eventually shut down, was in the middle of its pivot from study abroad to corporate travel risk management. The startup was rocky but working. Something else was forming in the back of my head that I couldn’t shake.

OffWeGo taught me three things.

1. Behavior change was the actual product. The technology was just how we delivered it.
2. You build for mission, not for exit.
But the third lesson took longer to name.

I was instructing Basic Keelboat at the Naval Academy that same summer and picking up hours at Washington Sailing School to keep the lights on while we weathered the pivot. Lying there on the couch between sprints and sailboats, watching YouTube sailors cross oceans, I kept thinking about Dad. There was one conversation, from his last few months, where I mentioned something about sailing for MS, connecting the Bike MS rides to the water somehow. It wasn’t formed enough to be a plan, and he died before it was.

Life kept moving. Work, relationships, holidays, one thing after another. But the idea kept circling. When I was a kid in Maine, I watched a kayaker get caught on the edge of a whirlpool, unable to paddle away from the pull. That’s what this was for years.

​Then ChatGPT came out in November 2022. I spent a weekend talking to it like a co-founder, challenging it, iterating, applying everything OffWeGo had taught me about building something from nothing. By Sunday night, I had a business plan, a roadmap, and a first-step list.

I wasn’t even thinking of formal incorporation yet. The idea had just finally stopped circling.

The first thing I needed to know was who else was building this already.

Walk MS exists. Bike MS exists. There is no Sail MS in the formal, scalable sense. And there is little to no adventure travel content, let alone sailing content, built for the disability community. Everything that exists is either pity content or inspiration porn.

Nobody is making content that says, “This is for you,” not, “This is about you.” Nobody is building real experiences for people whose worlds get smaller every year while the rest of the internet chases sunsets.

A few months ago, someone left a comment on a sailing influencer’s YouTube video that just clicked.

“I was diagnosed with stage four cancer seven months ago. I’ve always dreamed of sailing to beautiful exotic places. But never had the means of making it happen. So I live vicariously through watching you living your dream. Keep it up, brother. I love what you’re doing.”

That comment is the person Expedition MS was built for, before it had a name. In reading it, the third lesson finally had one too.

Solve the problem that won’t let you go.

Many of those channels are disappearing. SV Delos, with 900,000 subscribers, hauled their boat and spent the last year in Australia building a custom catamaran. Sailing La Vagabonde, with nearly 2 million subscribers and the biggest sailing channel on YouTube, just announced they’re selling their $1.9M trimaran to homestead on a farm. Sailing Zatara, with 620,000 subscribers, now splits time between the boat and a Montana homestead. Project Atticus quit sailing entirely last September. Sold the boat. Moved inland.

That’s nearly four million subscribers across four channels, and all four creators are either off the water, leaving the water, or pivoting away from sailing content. The generation that built this category is cycling out.

And the audience they built is still there, and still watching, including people like the viewer with stage four cancer, who found meaning in content that was never made for them, and now has fewer places to find it.

Those channels served lifestyle content that, albeit beautiful and aspirational, is built for able-bodied couples chasing sunsets. The millions living with MS, ALS, spinal cord injuries, terminal diagnoses, or other progressive conditions were never the target audience. But they were there anyway, watching from the margins, writing comments that went mostly unread.

So I cold-emailed Echo Bay Media on a whim, the Emmy-winning Canadian production studio behind Departures, a docuseries I’d binged after studying abroad to keep the travel bug alive in the dreary North Country winters at St. Lawrence. I pitched them a global sailing expedition documenting the MS experience, and they got on a call that same month.

Their business partner had already produced a sailing series for National Geographic, which had been nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Camerawork category. They were immediately invested.

A world-class production team saying this story matters before I had a boat, a nonprofit, or a dollar raised.

Next, I was at an industry leadership conference, and the gap everyone kept circling was adaptive sailing programs. US Sailing, the national governing body for the sport, was openly stating that we have unmet demand, and the supply side is thin. People want to sail, but the infrastructure to get them on the water, especially people with progressive conditions, barely exists.

Then, a few weeks later, I was at a boat show talking to the president of a leading performance catamaran builder about accessibility. Mid-conversation, almost offhand, he mentioned that one of their clients had just purchased a catamaran specifically because his wife has MS. They’d accelerated his retirement so they could sail together before her condition progressed further.

That’s how real the need is. Most families dealing with MS don’t have that option.

Finally, Oceans of Hope’s tenth-anniversary challenge launched this year and was oversubscribed.

Each one arrived without my engineering it, stacking on top of the one before, until the picture was impossible to ignore.

Expedition MS is a global sailing-and-storytelling nonprofit for the MS community.

A voyage might be a weekend in a sheltered harbor, a coastal passage up the East Coast, a transatlantic, or, for the racer who refuses to be sidelined, Wednesday night beer cans and an offshore season through Newport-Bermuda and the RORC Caribbean 600.

The shape depends on who’s aboard. Every crew is mixed. Every port is a community stop. Direct support for MS families wherever we go.

Oceans of Hope started this work nearly a decade ago. The first MS crew to sail around the world set out from Copenhagen in 2014. The British charity that grew from it has put over 2,000 people on the water since, and now its founder has given us carte blanche to take it bigger. And we are.

Our family has been inadvertently running toward this for a long time. Team Archie raised over $350,000 for MS research, most of it through a single annual Bike MS event. Now we’re taking it to sea.

​For people living with MS, the disease is one weight. The isolation is another. Sixty percent report loneliness as a direct result of the condition. More than half report unmet needs that have nothing to do with medication. One study called it being a “non-person to the rest of the world.”

My dad wrote a version of that down in 2012 and never showed it to anyone.

People who sail with Oceans of Hope don’t always come back talking about the sailing. They come back talking about cooking dinner for seven other people, standing watch at night, not thinking about the disease for most of it. For a week, the sea is the loudest thing.

The first Expedition MS voyage is what comes next. The crew is forming now.
You are reading this in time to be on it. ∎

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​If any of this resonated, if you live with MS, if you love someone who does, if chronic illness or disability sits at your kitchen table, if grief has rearranged your family, or if you carry the particular itch of a problem that won’t let you go, this is the part where you do something about it. If you’d want to sail with us someday, or give someone you love that chance, sign up for the first voyage. Share this with the person it made you think of, and subscribe to follow the build.
Learn more here: www.expeditionms.org  

The point of all of this is that fewer people are tired of being alone.

P.S. If you can help open doors for this, I can be reached at [email protected].