After weeks at sea, in an endless expanse of the deepest blue imaginable, Todd and Susan Vigland began to feel something primal – something hard wired in the human brain after tens of thousands of years on this planet.

It was April when the Viglands sailed across the Pacific Ocean on the largest single leg of a journey they began in 2021. They cooked up this bold adventure as a young couple more than 25 years ago, and now were living out the dream in a sleek but sturdy sailboat named Freya.

During a span of more than 30 days without land, in a roughly 4,000-mile stretch between Panama and the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia, focus and determination slowly blended with the unceasing rhythms of the natural world. Yes, they had more technology than people who made this journey hundreds of years ago, but those predecessors likely felt the same raw sensation:

The divide between human and earth, between man and his natural surroundings, continued to shrink and shrink. Eventually, it became hard to figure out where one ended and the other began.

“I just felt like I was so completely in tune with every sense that you have – all five senses,” Todd tells The Ticker. “You get into this beautiful rhythm of the ocean, the time, the weather, the days and nights. That crossing was a whole moon cycle – 31 consecutive sunsets and sunrises.”

Finally, during the last ink-black night of this immense crossing, solid ground was not far off. 

“Before we even saw land, we could smell it. And you could smell it from 30 miles away – it was unbelievable,” Susan says. “As the sun rose and we could see land, we were seeing the color green for the first time in a month. Basically we had only been seeing variations of blue for weeks and weeks.”

Todd and Susan are in the middle of a journey of a lifetime, with its end date and destination not yet determined. He’s a Benzie County native who spent many years in conservation, the last of those at the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy. She’s originally from Cadillac and spent many years at Hagerty (and in the community serving on the TART Trails board).

The Viglands met while working at a restaurant in Benzonia, and went sailing on Crystal Lake as their very first date in 1996. Before they even got married in 1999, they dreamed of living on a sailboat and seeing the world. But dreams are one thing, and reality is another.

“We knew we couldn’t afford to do it then, but we definitely wanted to do it while we were still physically able and full of energy,” Todd says. “So we wanted to at least make a plan. Her brother was a financial planner, and he told us we could do it if we started saving and stuck to it, so we got that going and worked hard to keep the dream alive for later on.”

They had a goal of quitting their jobs and shipping off at age 55, but they decided to accelerate things a bit after the turmoil of a global pandemic.

“When COVID hit, like everyone else, we sort of started to think about things differently,” Susan says.

They found and bought their perfect boat in Texas. After quitting their jobs, they moved aboard the boat and lived on it for more than a year in the Caribbean and east coast before arriving in Panama in January and preparing for the journey across the Pacific.  

In Panama, they met people from all around the world preparing for the same crossing. There was a small group – more people on average climb Mount Everest than cross the Pacific by sailboat, the Viglands say – and they’ll now count those fellow travelers as friends for a lifetime.  

“Everyone’s talking about the weather windows, when they hope to leave, what’s broken that they still need to fix,” Susan said. “And (once we left), every night during the crossing, we’d get on the radio and everyone would check in, and we would plot them on our chart so we could see how far away they were.”

They were lucky to have phenomenal weather during the crossing, during which they avoided any major brushes with danger.

“It would be easy to get intimidated by the enormity of it, because that’s a long way to go and we’re out there by ourselves, but we had faith in each other and faith in the boat, and we were lifted by the excitement of actually doing it,” Todd says. “It was just a pinnacle event.”

After landing in the Marquesas, the Viglands spent three months traveling around French Polynesia, including the Society Islands (famous for Tahiti and Bora Bora), then over to the Cook Islands, Samoa and Tonga before arriving at New Zealand, where Freya is now docked as the Viglands flew home to visit family.

They almost can’t find the words to describe the stunning beauty of that part of the world, both in terms of its landscape and its people.

“It’s been one of the most amazing parts of this experience. They invite us into their homes for dinner, they pick fruit from their trees and give it to us, they give us all sorts of handmade things from their cultures, they invite us to church,” Susan says. “They’ve opened up their homes and lives to us, and that’s been the case everywhere we’ve been in the Pacific islands.”

They also swam with humpback whales in Tonga. They were guided by natives who not long ago hunted whales for a living, but now supplement their income by curating whale watching (and swimming) for visitors.

“It was unbelievable, the most incredible experience of my life,” Susan says. “They come to Tonga to breed and have their young, and each time we saw a mother and her calf.”

As for what’s next, the Viglands will take it one season at a time. Sailing all the way around the world is “the dream” and is certainly possible, but it will depend on a number of factors, including money, their health, the health of their close loved ones and other factors.

“It’s hard to say,” Todd says. “There’s just so much ahead of us.”