Here’s proof that with proper planning, an ocean crossing is possible for two people in a 40-footer. No crew necessary.

Note: Over a three-and-a-half-week stretch during March and April, Marco and Karen Johnson guided their Nordhavn 40, Epic, across the Pacific Ocean. With minimal offshore experience, they departed La Paz, Mexico, and set a course for Nuku Hiva in French Polynesia, a journey of more than 2,800 nautical miles.

They spent 24 days at sea, diagnosing boat issues underway, overcoming health challenges and enduring the exhaustion of a grueling watch schedule. Along the way, they earned their Shellback stripes and, ultimately, the distinction of becoming ocean-crossers. Like any goal worth achieving, completing such an arduous journey made all the planning, preparation and perseverance well worth it.

Below, Marco describes exactly what it took for a twosome to cross an ocean in the smallest of passagemaking trawlers.

There is a moment on any long ocean crossing when the land you left behind stops being a place and becomes only a fact — a set of coordinates receding in the plotter’s memory. For Marco and Kar Johnson, that moment came somewhere off Isla Clarion, four days out of La Paz, with the John Deere main engine settled into a low, patient hum at 1,128 rpm and 2,300-some nautical miles of open Pacific still ahead of them. They called the boat Epic, a Nordhavn N40, number 66 in the series, husband-and-wife crewed, no hired hands, no delivery captain — just the two of them and roughly 1,216 gallons of diesel, carried partly in the main tanks and partly in a pair of custom-built bladders: 236 gallons lashed to the Portuguese flybridge, 60 more strapped to the aft deck. It was, by any normal cruising math, an absurd amount of fuel for a 40-foot boat. It was also, they’d decide by the end, exactly right. 

The Slow Boat Philosophy 

The mantra they’d carried aboard with them, go slow, go far, governed everything. Departure out of La Paz was miserable on its own terms: headwinds, opposing current, a crawling 2.8 to 3.2 knots rounding the Baja peninsula that made every reach for the throttle feel like a small betrayal of the plan. They didn’t speed up. Marco had internalized something from Jim Leishman’s old accounts of circling the globe in a Nordhavn 40 during the Around The World trip that the way you fail an ocean crossing isn’t by going too slow, it’s by running out of fuel before the end. So Marco and Kar idled along at 4.5 knots, sipping fuel at under a gallon an hour, watching the tank sight glasses like a doctor watching a patient’s vitals. Ten days in, weather allowing, they’d pump the flybridge bladder down into the main tanks with a 12-volt Rule pump — gravity feed as the backup plan if the pump quit — then do it again with the aft deck bladder sixty hours later. It was less a voyage than a long exercise in arithmetic: rpm against gallons, gallons against miles, miles against the unhurried, non-negotiable width of the Pacific Ocean. Word of the trip spread through the trawler community fast. Fellow Nordhavn owners tracked their position on Marine Traffic and asked pointed, practical questions about stabilizer setups, oil-change logistics on a passage where the main engine would never once be shut down, and whether paravanes were overkill. (“People don’t want paravanes,” a boat broker had once told Epic’s previous owner, but she cut him off mid-sentence, and deadpanned, “I read the book.”) Marco and Kar wanted every redundant system a boat could carry. 

When Things Break 

Redundancy earned its keep about three weeks in. The starboard stabilizer’s clevis head sheared, and for three days they rode confused seas on the port stabilizer alone. At first light the next morning they deployed the paravanes, or “fish”, trading half a knot of speed for a noticeably steadier ride. Then the port paravane’s strongback developed a knock they didn’t like the sound of. Rather than risk disassembling it at sea, they pulled the fish back in and stowed them, and rode the rest of the way to the Marquesas on a single working stabilizer, adjusting its setting by hand as the swell built and eased. The heavy plexiglass storm windows they’d never bothered installing before now earned their keep just by staying stowed in place . 

The Watch 

If the mechanical failures were the crossing’s drama, the sleep schedule was its slow-burning trial. Two hours on, two hours off, three hours on three hours off and eventually four hours on four hours off based on whenever exhaustion demanded. Said Marco: “When I can go longer, I do; if she can go longer on watch, she does; but neither of us goes without sleep.” Twenty-four days of disrupted sleep erodes a person in ways that don’t show up on any gauge. Physical fatigue, Marco would write later, sneaks up on you. 

Mental fatigue, caused by factors like what you eat, whether you exercise, how you manage the strange psychological weight of being permanently, mutually responsible for a boat and each other in the middle of nowhere, mattered more than either of them expected. 

Somewhere past the equator, after they’d earned their Shellback status, the trade winds finally arrived and the boat came alive under them, riding down following swells with that particular corkscrewing motion small offshore boats get to know intimately. Marco, by his own admission not a writer, tried anyway, one night 2,500 miles into the run: the slap of water against one sweet spot on the port bow that keeps you awake off-watch; the towering, generous rain clouds spaced every ten miles, washing the salt crust off the decks; the nightly calculation of whether a squall on radar needs dodging or can simply be outrun. Why do this? he asked himself, and didn’t fully answer, except to say something about old logbooks and the plain intrigue of what’s on the other side. 

Landfall

They crossed under Nordhavn escort of sorts — trading position reports with two other boats they’d first met at the Nordhavn Taco Run rally out of Dana Point the year before: Full Circle, running well ahead of them, and Last Arrow, a Nordhavn 60 that eventually came in from behind. Flying fish landed on deck often enough that they started closing the aft Dutch doors at night, both to keep the fish out and to feel, psychologically, a little more sealed off from the following sea. On the morning of April 5, 2026, 24 days, four-and-a-half hours, and 2,862.7 nautical miles after leaving the dock in La Paz, Epic made landfall at Taiohae Bay, Nuku Hiva, in the Marquesas. Average speed for the whole crossing: 4.93 knots. Fuel burned: 846 gallons, including the generator. They arrived with 370 gallons still in reserve — enough, by their own math, to have gone another 1,250 nautical miles if they’d had to. The oil in the main engine, never once changed across 580 hours of continuous running, looked (in Marco’s words) “remarkably clean”. They planned to send a sample in for analysis anyway. Some things you verify rather than trust. 

After the Ocean 

The story didn’t end at Nuku Hiva. Epic lingered in French Polynesia waiting on stabilizer parts and fuel, uncertain for a while whether diesel would even be reliably available given the state of the world that spring. Reassuringly, eventually, they found a fuel dock right on the concrete ship pier, priced no differently than Papeete. Months later, in July, they were underway again, running five-and-a-half days and just over 800 nautical miles from Aitutaki in the Cook Islands toward Neiafu, Tonga. It was new water for both of them, one rough 20-hour stretch of head seas the only real complaint in an otherwise clean passage. A generator fault sent them briefly hunting for parts through a diesel shop back in Bellingham, Washington, that had become, by then, a familiar and trusted name three-quarters of the way around the world. 

A Small Trawler Among the Sailors 

In Neiafu they picked up a mooring outside Mango’s, the harbor’s well-known waterfront bar, and rowed (literally, oars out, emergency-improvised) over after discovering mid-launch that their little inflatable tender’s electric motor battery hadn’t been charged. Faint cheers rose from the shoreline as they drifted before finding their stroke, onlookers wondering aloud how that mothership anchored out in the harbor had possibly gotten there. The anchorage was almost entirely sailboats, and inside Mango’s, a room full of salty, well-traveled cruisers who’d spent years working the South Pacific under canvas turned their attention on the couple who’d crossed by power alone. What boat! How’d you get it here? Where did you cross? How much fuel does it carry? The questions came fast. Marco found himself repeating the same phrase that had carried them the whole way: go slow, go far, tracing it back to Jim Leishman’s Nordhavn 40 circumnavigation and to another N40, Done Dreaming, that had made a similar Mexico-to-South-Pacific run 15 years prior. For the better part of an hour the room was theirs, and a hard-bitten old salt with a young three-man crew started asking pointed technical questions — horsepower, make, get-home rpm, fuel burn — until the whole bar had gone quiet to listen. It was only back aboard, later that night, that it settled in: the crossing hadn’t been just their own private adventure. In that anchorage, at that moment, they were one of only two trawlers who’d made an ocean passage into the South Pacific under power that season — the other being a Nordhavn 57, Beyond Capricorn, which had come up from Panama. Waiting out weather in Neiafu before pushing on toward Fiji, they also had a new electrical terminal block for the generator inbound, shipped to a corner of the Kingdom of Tonga where a package could apparently still take three weeks to clear customs. 

The Fiji Run 

The next passage tested them in a way no stabilizer failure had. They found a solid 75-hour weather window and set out from Neiafu for Savusavu, Fiji, sea state decent, everything by the numbers…until Kar was struck by a kidney stone attack partway across. Marco ended up single-handling Epic the rest of the way alone, an ocean crossing neither of them had planned for, arriving safely at Nawi Marina. What followed was a scramble through the Fijian medical system: a flight into Nadi, a taxi to a private hospital where an ultrasound and X-ray confirmed a stone lodged in the ureter, then a five-hour drive to Suva where a urologist removed a 7.5-millimeter stone. It turned out a stop they’d made earlier in Tonga — almost incidentally, at the hospital there — had left them with pain and infection medication already aboard, medicine that mattered a great deal in the days it took to reach real treatment. A stent placement and, later, its removal back in Suva closed out the ordeal. Marco’s takeaway, delivered with the same plain-spoken honesty that ran through the whole voyage: before you cross an ocean, make sure your medical kit is stocked for the ordinary emergencies, not just the dramatic ones. Kidney stones, it turns out, don’t care how many fuel bladders you’re carrying. Through all of it ran the same unhurried thread that had gotten them across the Pacific in the first place: carry more fuel — and more medicine — than you think you’ll need; fix what breaks with what’s aboard; and let the boat go exactly as fast as the ocean – and life – allows. No faster.