First He Built a Houseboat, Then He Came to Columbia

In the months before he joined Columbia Journalism School as a master’s student and Fulbright scholar, Johnny Sturgeon was living on a boat. It wasn’t just any boat, but a decommissioned oil rig lifeboat that he completely refurbished after raising around $50,000 in a digital crowdsource campaign that he ran on TikTok and Instagram. Sturgeon, who is from Yorkshire, England, lived on the boat for several months in the Thames River and the Grand Union Canal before packing it into a shipyard–for now–and decamping to New York.

Columbia News spoke to Sturgeon about his houseboat, his maritime reporting, and where he wants to sail next.

How did you first get into boating?

I really learned to sail from my grandfather, but everyone in the family is a swimmer or a sailor or a diver or a boater in some shape or form. My mother was the captain of her university diving club and is a paddleboard guidebook author.

I have a small following online, and people probably look at me and think, “that's the boat guy.”

But even within my own family, I’d say that my brother is more of a boat guy than I am. People always laugh when I say it, but I genuinely mean it: I think I like boats a normal amount.

What got you started on building your houseboat?

After I graduated from undergrad, I moved to a town where my grandfather lived, with a population of 10. I was the youngest person there by 50 years and I just started building the boat. I worked on it for around two years, and at some point decided to start raising money to complete the project online.

How does your interest in boats connect to your reporting?

My long-term goal is to report on maritime security and conflict. Piracy, gun running, drug smuggling, human trafficking, slavery, illegal fishing, whaling.

At the journalism school I’ve done pieces on fishing, on longshoreman strikes, on trade routes in the East River. I just finished a film about flood risk in Jamaica Bay for houses that are close to the water. I interviewed several residents about the near total destruction of Hurricane Sandy. And my master’s project is going to be on the impact of opioids within fishing communities in the Northeastern U.S., specifically in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and also in New Jersey. These communities have vastly disproportionate rates of opioid overdose, and there are also big issues with people overdosing while at sea, where they’re nowhere near a hospital.

Where is the boat you built now?

It’s in a boat yard in the U.K., waiting to see what happens when I return.

My long-term goal is to do offshore conflict reporting. But there’s also a nine-month folk sailing school in Norway I’m interested in, along with a few other ideas, like hitchhiking around Mexico. None of this is especially lucrative, so I may need to sell the boat to finance it.

Are there a lot of outlets that report on the seas?

There’s one project called the Outlaw Ocean Project that does this kind of reporting. But it’s peculiar that there aren’t more. Seventy percent of the world is covered in ocean. Ninety percent of all global trade moves across the ocean. There are so many possible stories. Everything from piracy to, for example, Catholic countries where abortion is outlawed and people set up floating abortion clinics that will deliver care offshore in international waters. There are so many stories out there, but it’s very resource-intensive to cover, so people often don’t.

What’s the most intrepid place you’ve sailed?

I’ve sailed on the West Coast of Mexico, in the Pacific, and on the North Sea. I’ve had a couple of close encounters with storms on the North Sea, but nothing too crazy. They say you’d rather be in harbor wishing to be at sea than at sea wishing to be in harbor. If you’re sailing responsibly, you’re avoiding the storms.

Any favorite New York City activities?

I like New York. I find it an exciting place. But I'm not a city person. I enjoyed, unsurprisingly, the ferry ride to Staten Island. I enjoyed going to Jamaica Bay, a community where a lot of people have a boat in their back garden out into the water. I'm drawn to those kinds of communities that maybe aren't seen or aren't recognized in the traditional fabric of New York.

Has anything about New York surprised you?

I've actually been surprised at how often people in New York forget that they are living in a seafaring town, that the historic roots of New York and the biggest business and trade is not really down in Wall Street, but practically speaking, is shipping and trade. This is a harbor. So it surprises me on a day-to-day basis, how often people just completely forget that they live on this peculiar, small, little island, jutting out over two rivers, and are surrounded day in, day out by boat traffic.