Elana Connor was only two years old when her mother was murdered, triggering a childhood plagued with abuse, homelessness and a revolving door of foster care placements.
Now she’s sailing solo around the world, with her rescue dog Zia, to shine a light for children dealt a rough start in life and to help them get more support from their local communities.
So far, Elana has crossed more than 15,000 nautical miles on her yacht Windfola on a journey that began in San Francisco seven years ago.
Her first long passage was to Hawaii and back, before she packed up her life and set sail indefinitely, island hopping through the South Pacific and then circumnavigating New Zealand.
Since arriving in Australia a year ago, Elana has partnered with yacht clubs from Mooloolaba to Melbourne to raise money and build relationships with youth services, and to create awareness about the realities of growing up without stability.
“When I was in foster care, the emphasis was always on surviving, not thriving, and I think this is still true in most care systems around the world. Dreams aren’t really an option,” Elana said.
“Services aren’t funded enough and they can only provide that clinical approach. I really think the answer to the issues for young people today is that their communities take more responsibility for them, rather than outsourcing this to the government.
“These young people are right here in your community and they could do amazing things if you back them now. Don’t make them fight and struggle because that’s when people end up falling off the rails.”
Part of Elana’s fundraising work has been running classes for women on servicing and repairing diesel boat engines, with proceeds going to youth services in each port.
Along her journey, she has also invited groups of foster kids onto Windfola and shared in their excitement at doing something that wouldn’t normally be accessible to them.
“When I meet other people in foster care, no matter where they are in the world, we have very similar experiences. It’s like meeting your lost brothers and sisters and it has really healed something in me,” Elana said.
“When I was in foster care, I never met an adult who had also been in care. I had no role models and it doesn’t need to be like that. Representation is a type of permission. I’m shining a light for them and letting them know they have a right to dream and that they can achieve great things.”
Elana’s goal when she leaves each port is for the relationship between the yacht clubs and youth services to be ongoing and so far, it’s happening.
In New Zealand, her fundraising efforts created a scholarship for foster kids to attend programs on the Spirit of New Zealand tall ship.
In Australia, yacht clubs have keenly embraced Elana’s mission. Among the organisations to benefit are Brisbane Youth Services (partnering with Wynnum Manly Yacht Club), Making Waves Foundation (partnering with Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club), and Latitudes Directions for Young People (partnering with Hobsons Bay Yacht Club).
After leaving Melbourne, Elana will sail west to Portland, Adelaide and Perth before crossing the Indian Ocean to Africa in May and June.
So far, her journey has been loosely planned, intentionally slow and purpose driven. She travels under the banner “Peregrina Sails” (Peregrina means pilgrim) and tries to be of service everywhere she goes rather than a consumer traveller.
“I set out taking a break from my desk job to sail to Hawaii and it’s turned into a pilgrimage around the world,” she said. “I love ocean sailing and I don’t feel done yet. I’m uniquely positioned to share my story and do something for this community of young people.”
ELANA’S STORY
To meet the inspiring and high-achieving woman that Elana is today is a far cry from the broken, suicidal teenager she once was.
Her young life was forever fractured when her mother was murdered when Elana was just 2½ years old. A police investigation failed to lead to a conviction and Elana and her older brother were raised by their father, until she become a homeless teen who was taken into the foster care system.
As a child, Elana was told that her mother was killed in a car accident.
As a teen, she was told that her mother was murdered by a serial killer.
As a young woman, she went looking for answers and court documents led her to her mother’s lawyer and other friends and family.
“It turned out my mum and dad were divorcing. My mum had chosen to leave my dad because he was violent. She fought really hard to win custody of my brother and I, and did.”
Elana said not long after the custody case, her mother went missing and her body was found a month later by the side of a highway. The cause of death was “blunt force trauma”. She was just 27 years old.
Elana’s father, now deceased, denied any involvement in her mother’s death.
“My earliest memories are his violence towards me and my brother, and just being completely isolated with him in the middle of nowhere in a rural setting.
“The difficult thing when you come from domestic violence, when you’re young you really love your parents, even when they’re really messed up. So there were glimmers of my dad playing his guitar to us, or singing to us and hugging us, or sitting in his lap and curling up to him, so it was complicated.
“There was good dad and then there was difficult dad and you feel like if you’re just good enough, maybe you’ll just get good dad, so as child you begin to try to exert control over your environment.”
As a young teen, Elana finally confided in a few close friends who insisted she tell authorities. Fearing the consequences at home, she ran away and couch surfed – “a very common form of youth homelessness” – while an investigation was launched.
“Things got really dark for me. I developed an eating disorder, I was self-harming, I really was not ok. I was still going to school, but I was falling off the rails … I just wanted to die,” she said.
“And I had been a really good student. I was in sport, I was in a play at school. I was doing everything possible to be as perfect as possible.”
What followed was the complicated stress of police and child welfare interviews while trying to stay in school and couch surfing with limited resources.
A suicide attempt triggered the healthcare interventions that would save her life. Elana was admitted to a psychiatric facility and taken into the custody of the foster care system.
“I had a few different placements and I ended up in some group homes. It was difficult to find a placement for me because who wants to take on a 15-year-old girl with self-harm issues who’s going through a court case?
“The one good thing about the state taking custody of me is that things started to move forward. A lawyer was assigned to advocate for me so I didn’t have to talk to investigators directly unless they were child specialists.
“I think that really intense mental health intervention set me up for the rest of my life to be much better and to kickstart my healing. I had to undo a lot of really dysfunctional behaviours.”
Elana never lived with her father again and after her paternal grandmother testified in court he was convicted and jailed for crimes against her.
Between her grandmother, case-worker and a school nurse, Elana said she had a few women who were interested in her welfare and became like a new family.
At 17, as she was ageing out of the foster care system, Elana was able to get financial assistance to live independently and attend an alternative high school, where she did classes in the morning and worked at night to help support herself.
After finishing high school, she started doing nannying jobs to support herself through university and graduated from a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations.
By this time, Elana had moved to San Francisco – which she now considers home – and got a job as an administrative assistant in Silicon Valley, where she worked her way up to project management.
And then came sailing.
SAILING
Elana found peace and a place to heal in the great outdoors. She had already been doing long-distance treks when she was first introduced to sailing and found a passion that would take her life in a whole new direction.
She started out doing yacht races at a local club in San Francisco before she began to consider the possibility of long-distance cruising and travel writing.
“I loved sailing right away and I’d always wanted to be a writer. Working a desk job was never really for me, but when you’re in care you have no safety net so I was just trying to create my own stability,” she said.
“Then when I was 31/32, I had a bit of a health scare – I’m fine now – but it was a real wake-up call and just made me think, what am I even doing with my life?”
By this time, Elana had a new sailing family who were supportive of her dream.
“In San Francisco, there’s a very strong short-handed sailing association and there were two people on my race boat that had both raced solo from California to Hawaii on small boats under 30 feet.
“One was a woman and she was a total bad ass. She was 60 and she had rainbow-coloured, salt-and-pepper hair and this Sailor Jerry hula girl tattoo.
“She was like a modern-day pirate and she said, ‘Yeah you can get a boat, yeah you can go’. Some women can stand in themselves a bit stronger, but at that point in time it was like I needed other people to give me permission in order to give myself permission. I needed other people to say, ‘you can do that’ in order for me to believe it was possible.”
Elana became a sponge of information – boats, engines, cruising, weather patterns – and eventually bought her beloved Windfola, a 34-foot Sabre Yacht built in 1985.
After nine months of short trips to learn the ropes, and when the weather was right, she set sail to Hawaii.
CROSSING OCEANS
Elana is a walking example of being afraid to do something and doing it anyway.
Her first long passage from San Francisco to Hawaii took 26 days, but she almost had to quit three days into the journey.
“I was very, very seasick for the first three days. I couldn’t keep anything down, not even crackers and water, so I began to get really worried. I started to get dizzy and when I felt it coming, I would lay down on the floor.
“I did have a satellite device and I was texting people back home. By day three I thought, if this doesn’t ease up, I’m going to have to go back. But it did stop and everything just sort of magically came into alignment. I just felt so good and everything felt right.”
Along the journey, Elana’s engine has died twice at sea – while making landfall in Hawaii and again while crossing the Tasman Sea – and Windfola got hit by another boat while on anchor, leading to a costly delay in her trip.
She was in New Zealand when Covid hit and made the decision to stay with her boat – her home – and dog Zia rather than return to the US and be grounded indefinitely.
Elana said while solo sailing can be daunting, and there’s always unexpected challenges, she doesn’t ever feel alone.
“I fundamentally believe that nobody does anything like this alone. I still need help and people are still teaching me things. I love that about sailing and boat ownership,” she said.
“There is not a single direction I can look on my boat without seeing someone in my life and their fingerprint on this boat. Like the person who helped me get the ingredients to mix the oil for this wood.
“I remember the first person who showed me how to service a winch and when I look inside, I see those touches from everyone in my life that has lifted me up and supported me.”
Plus, she has her dog Zia for company everywhere she goes.
“I’ve had her since before I learnt to sail and was like, ‘I’m only doing this if you can do it too’ and she was cool with it.”
Elana has financed her years-long voyage with the nest egg she saved while working in Silicon Valley and by living very frugally. She has also managed to generate an income from her writing and Patreon subscriptions.
“I live very simply. I eat very simply. My boat has no refrigeration. All my clothes are second-hand. My car is a kayak, so if I can’t kayak in because the wind is too strong then I don’t go to shore.
“I bought a solid, small boat that’s very simple to maintain and I try to do as much of the maintenance myself as possible.”
PAYING IT FORWARD
Elana said her whole life has been about “making lemonade from lemons”.
Despite the hardship of her upbringing, Elana has always felt lucky to have people in her corner – the women who stood by her as a teenager, the families she nannied for, her sailing community and the couple who became like surrogate parents.
“I think we can heal from trauma, but I think we peel back new layers of it as well as we age,” she said. “For me, I remember when I reached the same age as my mother when she was killed – that was really big for me and I had to have a lot of counselling.
“There have been other heartbreaks along the way. I set off as a reluctant solo sailor hoping I would find my person and that hasn’t happened yet. There are realities of being a woman who is getting older and there are doors that are probably not that far off closing. Each of those things requires doing some more healing work.”
It was when she was crossing the Pacific that Elana realised she needed to pay it forward and do more than just live the dream life of a sailing nomad.
“Here I was in the tropics, free diving with fish every day, pulling into anchorages to see friends I’d met on different islands. But it started to click that I needed to find some purpose that includes making other people’s lives better,” she said.
“I started to come out on my social media saying, ‘If you think what I’m doing is cool as a woman sailing solo, let me tell you a little bit more about what I come from’.
“That’s when I started to talk about foster care and decided to try and use my sailing to spotlight foster care issues around the world and charities that are doing things to alleviate those issues.
“What I discovered is that there are a lot of universal problems that affected me when I was in care and they’re affecting children today in completely different countries in the same way they affected me.”
It turned out that telling her story has been as scary as sailing solo across oceans, but the impact has been so positive – for other youth in foster care and for her own healing – that she’s determined to keep going.
“I get scared all the time. I’m scared of everything actually. I’ve been scared of telling my story and scared of coming out publicly. I’ve been scared since I was really little and I don’t want to be scared any more. I don’t want to hold back any more.
“I’ve met so many young people and so many practitioners doing really interesting, alternative things – small community organisations having a massive impact on kids in their community.
“Being a foster carer is not the only pathway to supporting youth who are experiencing these things in your community. All it takes is one thing, one adult to care about you and give you a sense of belonging in the world.”
THE STATS:
- In Australia, there are more than 60,000 children on protection orders, of which more than 45,000 are in out-of-home care.
- In the USA, there are 400,000 children in care.
- In the UK, there are 95,000 children in care.
- In Canada, there are 78,000 children in care.
- In New Zealand, there are 6000 children in care.
ELANA:
YOUTH SERVICES:
Williamstown, Victoria: Latitude
Newcastle and Geelong: Home – Making Waves
Brisbane: Home – Brisbane Youth Service
CRISIS SUPPORT:
Lifeline: Lifeline Australia – 13 11 14 – Crisis Support. Suicide Prevention.
Domestic violence: Safe Steps Family Violence Response Centre – 24/7 support for Victorians
Kids Helpline: Kids Helpline | Phone Counselling Service | 1800 55 1800
