A Month at Sea With NOLS in Baja California

I had never been both incredibly homesick and happier to be far away from home more than the night I slept on the Mexican coast, tucked behind a beached sailboat as the wind raged on.

In my sophomore year of university back in 2025, I along with 14 other students spent the entire month of January navigating the Sea of Cortez by sailboat, cooking and camping under the stars with only two pairs of T-shirts, a jacket, and a trusty pair of fleece pants. I couldn’t have felt further from my home in Manila, where everything I needed, and considerably more, had always been within reach.

Our sailing vessel, en route to the next campsite.

I embarked on a sailing expedition with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), where there was no access to a phone, running water, and no way out but through. Founded in Wyoming in 1965, NOLS teaches wilderness skills, leadership, and a particular outdoor sport such as horsepacking, mountaineering, or sailing. While some sports such as backcountry skiing are only hosted in the winters, most activities take place regardless of the season. What one actually learns on these expeditions runs beneath: how to disagree with someone you share a “bathroom” shovel with, how to keep working even while exhausted, how to want to run home and stay anyway.

I have spent most of my life learning about the limits of my body and mind. Eighteen years of ballet taught me that discomfort has a shape, a duration, a value—you hold the position because after comes the applause. Trekking taught me that discomfort, given enough hours, stops being a nuisance and just becomes the terrain you’re walking on.

I thought I understood what discomfort was by the time I boarded the eighteen-foot sailboat in Baja California, surrounded by strangers and a set of clothes that fit into two small duffle bags. I was wrong.

During a knot technique workshop session.

On this night, one of the windiest nights of the trip, we were awoken by our instructors in the early hours of the morning.

Suza told us the wind was too strong to keep the boats anchored in the shallows, and that we needed to roll them up onto the beach.

I slipped into a military-grade foul-weather suit. I was as miserable as I was cold. But something shifted as we worked—strangers quickly becoming friends, laughing at each other through the beams of our headlamps, hauling in sync. When all five boats were finally resting ashore, I set up my sleeping bag beside one of them to block the wind. It is one of the best worst-nights of sleep I’ve ever had.

The kitchen setup. — The “kitchen” setup.

“Room service” takes on another form entirely in the Sea of Cortez. You sit around canister stoves, each one lighting up the long stretch of beach. The ocean before you recedes into the night as the smell of stir-fry—or fish, if someone had caught one—circles through the cool air. We were learning to embrace the basics, held up by the community we were building and the beautiful landscape all around.

Instead, it was simple in the most complex way, and that, it seems, was the luxuryLuxuryA lifestyle defined by exceptional quality, craftsmanship, exclusivity, and sophistication, encompassing the finest products, services, and experiences that represent the highest standards of refinement and excellence.Go to Luxury Glossary within. Simplicity was the meal itself, eating from in the same bowl I’d carried with me all week. Being able to finally place the bowl on top of my lap was the complex part; it carried the exhaustion, the company, the salt on my skin from a day out at sea.

Transience was a comfort, but some stretches of that month felt endless. On one particular day, our instructors spread us out across the dunes, far enough apart for us to feel alone as we watched the setting sun. For these few hours, I sat with my thoughts and a bottle of water. No book, music, no one to talk to or perform for. The quiet quickly turned heavy. There was no Instagram reel, no inbox I usually check to disguise myself as busy.

I had to sit through this moment that felt painfully infinite: Without anything to perform for, I did not know what to do with my own attention. It caught on to the sand stuck beneath my nails, on the sound of wind rustling through the brush. I realized soon after that I did not always have to fill silence or empty space. To have to be fully present is indeed a luxury. I was able to be, immersed in the golden desert as the sun slipped under the sea.

I am aware of how easily “luxuryLuxuryA lifestyle defined by exceptional quality, craftsmanship, exclusivity, and sophistication, encompassing the finest products, services, and experiences that represent the highest standards of refinement and excellence.Go to Luxury Glossary” can curdle into something else entirely. Simplicity, for most of the world, is life. What made this experience a luxury to me was knowing it was transient. I had a return flight and a bed waiting for me back home. That knowledge was a privilege, and this expedition would not have meant what it did without this honesty.

Naturally, most families intentionally insulate their children from discomfort. You might have heard of others sending theirs off to the outdoors for a few days at a time, in the hopes that they come back with a resilience that will earn them a seat at the head of the boardroom table. Many schools send their students to similar programs, sending their students away, also hoping they come back a bit more capable of sitting with something they can’t immediately fix.

Hallie, a fellow student, bundled in her sleeping bag. — Hallie, a fellow student, bundled up in her sleeping bag.

The lessons I learned as we set sail along the Baja California peninsula are undoubtedly ones I will take with me through my professional career, but what proves invaluable are the lessons I learned from the very act of seeking discomfort when those around me have worked so hard to keep me away from it.

Rest and recreation day spent at the hot springs.

On the last morning, I sat on the beach trying to fold a month of my life back into two duffle bags that had somehow shrunk since I’d arrived. Nothing fit, and I worked the zipper back and forth in frustration that I began to cry. Over gear, over nothing, over the entire month that I wasn’t ready to compress into carry-on dimensions.

While other coastlines from my past travels have blended into one, I still know the exact color the water turned as dawn broke, off a beach with no name. I know which knot held the sail to the mast, and which one didn’t.

I know the feeling of that first unfamiliar night under the stars, and the last one, spent among strangers who had become entire people to me—with stories, goals, and fears traded over campfires. Back home, I unpacked my bags onto the floor of my room. For a while, I left everything to sit there because for once, I wasn’t in a rush to be anywhere else.

More information on NOLS here.

Photos courtesy of the author.