How Two Seasteaders Wound Up Marked For Death

If a tiny floating cottage brought down the wrath of the thai navy, is there any hope for stateless life at sea?

- Brian Doherty

There they were, sweethearts Chad and Nadia, bedding down in a cozy floating home more than 12 miles off the coast of Thailand. Like any other vacationing couple, they shot videos to share with friends online. They had a 360-degree oceanfront view, with calm, sparkling blue water stretching out as far as the eye could see. Popping champagne, they were delighted by the “thousand million stars” they felt they could see at night.

But the pleasure of those views of sea and stars had an unexpectedly high cost: In April, the Thai navy hit them with threats of arrest for a capital crime. That moment of rare communion with the setting sun, from a 6-square-meter octagonal hut attached to a 20-meter-tall spar anchored in the Andaman Sea, seriously threatened the sovereignty of Thailand—or so that nation claimed. At a likely cost of about $1 million, three Royal Thai Navy boats dragged the hut back to shore.

As the Bangkok Post reported, the Thai navy insisted that Chad and Nadia’s small floating part-time home violated Section 119 of the Criminal Code, which “concerns any acts that cause the country or parts of it to fall under the sovereignty of a foreign state or deterioration of the state’s independence.” Worse still: “It is punishable by death or life imprisonment.”

For Chad Elwartowski and his now-wife Nadia Summergirl (her chosen name; the Thai native was previously Supranee Thepdet), the problem wasn’t their tiny hut with the glorious view per se. It wasn’t really about the specific thing they did. The problem was the idea motivating the otherwise generally untroubling act of dwelling atop the ocean, something that the fishing boats they often saw from their floating home do every day. They wanted to be pioneers in an experiment combining political independence, self-sufficiency, space travel, and personal liberty.