Life for young couple means working remotely on a sailboat in the Bahamas
OCEAN CITY — In February, Taylor (Hennessy) Stickel and her husband, Chris, were at a reef in the Bahamas looking for lobsters for a friend who was planning a romantic dinner. It’s not clear whether they ever found those lobsters, but Taylor wound up with a world spearfishing record.
The 2011 Ocean City High School graduate and her husband are taking the remote work lifestyle pretty far. They live on a sailboat in the Bahamas. Married for about a year and half, the young couple do their 9-to-5 routine on the boat, but in their spare time they are on the hunt under the water.
The day before Valentine’s Day, Taylor speared a 34.6-pound permit (Trachinotus falcatus), which set an International Underwater Spearfishing Association record for a woman in the sling/polespear category.
“Our friend had sent us on a mission … . We were supposed to retrieve these lobsters for him and his girlfriend, for this romantic date,” Taylor said. Because of their mission, they were set up to catch lobsters and didn’t have the right gear for a fish that big.
“We came across this spot … and the reef was just gorgeous. There was an abundance of fish. It was a beautiful lively reef, which nowadays is rare. I was just in awe and didn’t want to leave,” she added.
Chris, who was topside in the boat, wanted to head for another spot.
“I was yelling at her, ‘It’s time to go! You’ve been in the water and we’re all ready to leave.’ She said, ‘One more second. I see a permit down here.’”
“Sure enough, two big permits swam by and I ended up getting the bigger of the two with the lobster setup, which is very cool and unexpected,” she said. “It took a perfect scenario for that to be pulled off.”
Chris had speared a “normal-size” permit the week before, weighing in around 7 or 8 pounds. He was shocked when he saw Taylor’s permit.
“She knew the only way for her to get it, because they’re a really strong fish, is to disable it, so she tried to shoot it in the spine, which she actually did,” Chris said.
“When she came back to the boat, we couldn’t believe it. I knew immediately on seeing the head of the fish that it was likely a world record.”
He asked for someone on the boat to jump into the water to help.
Nobody did.
Chris didn’t know how she was going to get that big fish back to the boat.
“I didn’t know it was paralyzed at that point,” he said.
It was a good thing nobody helped her; to get the spearfishing record, she had to do everything herself.
“You can’t have anybody jump in to help you. You have to swim that fish back to the boat so it actually worked out because I didn’t know the rules at the time,” Chris said.
Taylor swam back with the fish and handed it up to them.
“It was insane when we laid that fish on the deck,” Chris said.
As Taylor reported to the spearfishing association, she was tracking a large mutton snapper along a 25-foot ledge on the reef when she spotted the two permits.
“Ideally, I would have liked to have my slip tip, midsection length, and float line, but nothing could stop me in that moment,” she said.
She had the permit cornered, but there was too much distance between them. When it took its first pass, she pulled her 6-foot JBL Shaka Polespear with a flopper back as far as she could, hoping the big fish would turn around looking for the smaller permit.
“When it did exactly that, I let the spear fly and made contact with the upper portion of its back. I knew it had caught the spine because the permit wasn’t fighting at all,” she told the association. When she jumped into the boat, “No one could believe what just happened. There it was, the fish of my dreams.”
A few months later, Taylor recounted the moment, saying it was “surreal.”
“When you get a big reward like that after going spearfishing for multiple hours and days and come across a fish like that, it blows you away. It takes the words right out of your mouth,” she said.
Taylor didn’t follow spearfishing records but she did recognize she had something special.
“I looked at it and said, ‘Dang, that’s a big permit.’ We speared them before in the past so I kind of knew what an average permit was. I knew that was a huge fish in front of me. I didn’t know it was a world record at the time. I’m not surprised because that thing is a behemoth of a fish.”
Headache getting the fish weighed
Getting the fish officially weighed wasn’t easy. Normally, there are plenty of official scales in the Bahamas because of the many fishing tournaments, Chris said, but because of COVID marinas didn’t bother getting their scales certified. Chris and Taylor drove all over getting the fish weighed a half-dozen times or so as they spoke to people from the association, who told them they needed to find a certified scale. They finally had a certified scale shipped to Nassau.
The process took them eight days.
“And we live on a boat that doesn’t have an ice machine,” Chris said. “We were purchasing ice to keep this thing on ice for eight days.”
The headache continued as the association wanted them to cross-certify the fish with other scales. At one point they told them to get rid of the fish, but they were glad they didn’t until the certification of the world record was official.
“Thank God, because Taylor was so excited thinking she got the record,” he said.
He noted after eight days, the fish was starting to shrivel up a bit, even on ice, and probably lost three or four pounds. “It was still plenty big enough to get the record,” he noted.
Chris introduced Taylor to spearfishing; a move to the Bahamas
Chris, 32, has been spearfishing since he was 5 years old. Taylor picked up spearfishing when they began dating 6 years ago.
“She started with me and my buddy and would drive us around on the boat while we would dive,” he said. “We finally convinced her to jump in and take a look even if she didn’t shoot something. She said she wanted to try and fell in love with it.
“She’s a natural. She can dive deeper and stay down longer and get closer to bigger fish than I can. I don’t know why. She’s pretty amazing. Now she’s better than me at it.”
Chris learned to spearfish at the Jersey shore. That’s where he taught Taylor.
The couple, who had one of those COVID marriage scenarios — getting married alone because of restrictions and then having a big party with everyone nine months later — had the chance to visit friends in the Bahamas. They fell in love with the location.
“We’re used to diving with 5 feet of visibility up here (in South Jersey). It’s murky water. We fell in love where you can see 100 feet. You can dive a lot deeper. It’s safer because everyone can watch you. Here you’re diving into the abyss and it’s not quite as safe.”
He noted it is all free diving — no scuba gear.
“I’ve watched her kill fish in 75, 80 feet of water. It’s pretty impressive. She’s a hell of an athlete. She deserved this fish. She loves diving,” Chris said.
Taylor, 29, a former soccer player at OCHS and a surfer, said she and her husband have always been water people. That’s part of why she took to spearfishing.
“What got me into it is that I love everything water-related, just about. We both have always been water people,” she said.
She enjoys the hunt involved with spearfishing, learning the habitats and figuring out different types of fish behavior because species act in different ways.
“Trying to predict their movements, their habitat and what they’re going to do next is very intriguing to me. Also being submerged in their environment.
“The beauty of the coral reefs — I think that’s definitely my favorite thing about it. You can disconnect from the world … and just be present in that moment. It’s very special,” she said. “Not too many people can relate to that. It requires a lot of time, effort and dedication. The few people who can relate to it — usually it’s a special bond. It’s cool. It’s hard to put into words. It has captivated my attention and probably will for years to come.”
Back visiting at the Jersey shore
“We actually live on a sailboat in the Bahamas for nine months of the year and then visit our families during the summer months,” Chris said.
Taylor’s family owns Heritage Surf and Sport in Ocean City. Chris’s family also is from the region.
He works for a consulting company out of Philadelphia and Taylor has her own retail business online. They are both on their computers all day long on the sailboat.
“It’s a great time. It’s a temporary thing,” Chris said. “It’s like glorified camping. It’s not the nicest boat, but it works for us. We have separate rooms to work from. It’s nice for now, until we have kids. It’s very exciting, but temporary.”
A friend told them that it used to be all retirees who were staying on the boats in the Bahamas, but that changed during COVID.
“He said up until the last few years he was the only young kid out there. Everyone else was retirees. It was amazing this year how many young couples there were on boats because everyone is doing the remote thing now,” Chris said. “There are tons of young couples traveling and working from their vans or RVs or boats. It’s crazy how COVID changed the world.”
For him, he’s been remote working for the past nine years, and others thought him a rarity that he worked from home. “Now if you’re not working from home, you’re asking them, ‘why not?’”
And why not on a sailboat in the Bahamas?
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff