Mother reveals family life on a yacht with 11 kids before tragedy struck
Prior to the awful Hawkesbury River drowning of toddler Zeinobiyah Soetekouw on Tuesday, journalist Ali Lowe met 'Zobbie' and her 10 siblings earlier this year as the seafaring family opened up about living on a yacht. This is their story.
Beccie Soetekouw has been up for most of the night on board Sumbawa, the boat she lives on with husband Steve and their — wait for it — 11 children.
“We had seven sick, plus me,” said the 35-year-old, who has lived on board the 43-foot yacht for two years.
“With our family, it’s not like one gets it and then it finishes and the next one gets it — we all get it at once. We finally got some sleep at 5am. It’s sort of like working all night — you just deal with the vomit and crying and hope it’s going to end soon. That and lots of buckets!”
This is an undoubted downside of boat life, but for the most part, the Soetekouw clan live a life that is the stuff of dreams: nomadic, exploratory and free.
It is an existence so unique to those of us who live in brick houses and hold down regular day jobs that it caught the interest of Castlecrag photographer Alex Vaughan, whose portrait of the family, Sumbawa Pride — Life on a Boat with Eleven Kids, was a finalist in the 2019 National Photographic Portrait Prize.
Vaughan took the black-and-white snap at Chinamans Beach, after Garry White, the Coffee Boat Man, told her about the vibrant family moored nearby.
For the children — Natasha, 15, Blade, 14, Ryan, 12, Nakita, 11, Alec, 10, Hunter, 8, Amlayah, 7, Yasha, 5, Azanyah, 4, Zeinobiyah, 2, and one-year-old Shakirah — boat life is fast becoming the norm, certainly for the younger ones, and on Sumbawa, everybody pulls their weight.
“I’m not as busy as people think I am because we have such a system set up,” said Soetekouw. “We prepare breakfast at night — we have porridge, so we heat the water and put the oats in so it’s ready for the morning. I don’t have to cook dinner for the kids at all — they all do that, everyone down to Amlayah, who’s seven. Yasha, Azanyah and Zeinoniyah all help the bigger ones.”
Meals are prepared in a 14-litre stovetop pressure cooker, and together the family gets through two kilos of rice or pasta a night, along with a kilo of meat and vegetables and spices
“We go through fresh food really quickly. It’s our biggest expense,” Soetekouw said.
The family shops every three days, filling up four large camping backpacks with necessities to take back to the boat. When they were moored at Manly this was easy, thanks to the proximity of supermarkets to the wharf, but during their extended stint at Mosman, it was a different matter.
“We had to climb up the hill from Chinamans Beach, get on the bus, go to the shops, then come back again,” said Soetekouw. “I really liked that hill when I was pregnant, because I was hoping it would bring on the birth.”
As it turns out, it did. Shakirah was born on board Sumbawa, off the waters of Chinamans Beach, last February, weighing 4.2kg. Surely this was no mean feat?
“It was actually really easy,” said Soetekouw. “I had already been to a doctor in Mosman, and Manly Hospital was on standby. We had the water police coming round regularly making sure I was OK and saying, ‘give us a call if you need help!’ But her birth was just over an hour long.
“We’ve had five babies at home before. I normally say that we had five in hospital like normal people, five at home like crazy people, and one on a boat like insane people!”
Shakirah — or Squeak as she’s known — is a true water baby. “We’ve really got to watch her because she’s almost walking and she loves the water. Every time she is up on deck she’s in a life jacket,” Soetekouw said.
The children are homeschooled. Natasha has written 10,000 words of a novel.
“I get more inspiration from the water than anything,” she says.
Blade is into electronics and coding, and loves helping his dad with the boat’s motor; Amlayah likes to work with clay. But while you get the distinct impression these kids are confident, well-rounded and clever, it’s even more abundantly clear that each possesses the same wanderlust as their parents. The adventurous brood has never left Australia. But now the boat’s motor is finally fixed — the reason the family has been docked in Sydney for so long — the world is their oyster.
The family, who are living off savings, will travel up the east coast before ultimately buying a bigger boat and travelling the world. Ryan wants to go to Egypt, Hunter is desperate to go to Italy and Amlayah to Russia. Natasha, who speaks some Spanish, wants to go to Spain. And Dad? “A tropical island,” he said.
But does this seafaring crew, who once lived on a farm in Tasmania with chickens and goats, ever miss dry land?
For Steve, it is the convenience of being able to jump in the car to get from A to B. For his wife, it is the ability to live off the land as they did in Tassie.
But neither would change their life as it is now.
“Sometimes I think, ‘wow, I would love a place that is stationary’,” Soetekouw said. “But then you come outside (on deck) in the mornings and the sun is rising and the water’s moving and it’s just beautiful.”
Follow the Soetekouw family at instagram.com/ourroundtheworldadventure or via their blog thelargefamilyaroundtheworldadventure.com
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