Oliver Widger is going viral as he documents his journey across the Pacific Ocean on social media. His sole crewmate on the voyage is his cat, Phoenix.
PORTLAND, Ore. — A 29-year-old Clackamas High School graduate is sailing from Oregon to Hawaii with no prior open-ocean experience, a rare spinal condition, and a cat named Phoenix — and winning hearts across the internet along the way.
Three years ago, Oliver Widger was diagnosed with Klippel-Feil Syndrome, a condition that causes abnormal fusion of cervical vertebrae. Doctors told him surgery could lead to paralysis. That diagnosis became a turning point.
“I was diagnosed with a spine that looks like it belongs to someone over 115 years old,” Widger said. “All of the vertebrae are fused. It’s just a big mess.”
Faced with the possibility of a future spent immobile, Widger made a radical decision several months ago: he quit his job, cashed out his 401(k), bought a $50,000 sailboat, and started learning how to sail — with help from YouTube and a neighbor.
He said one day at work, a customer came in wearing a shirt with a sailboat on it. Widger told the customer that sailing was his dream and that he wanted to sail around the world.
“A customer told me, ‘If you want to sail the world, what are you doing here?'” he said. “The next day, I quit.”
Widger moved to the Oregon Coast, where he spent ten hours a day, seven days a week refitting the boat — mostly alone, except for Phoenix, the cat he rescued from a dumpster seven years ago.
On April 30, 2025, he set sail from Warrenton Marina for Hawaii, a 2,400-mile voyage expected to take around three weeks. It’s his first time sailing outside a river.
“This is day one of crossing the Pacific Ocean,” he said in a video posted to TikTok.
Since then, Widger has weathered storms, fixed a broken rudder, and shared emotional highs and lows with his followers. Despite the chaos, he calls the experience “every single emotion you could imagine” and “absolutely awesome.”
His account, @Sailing_With_Phoenix, has exploded in popularity, amassing almost 800,000 followers on Instagram and another 600,000 on TikTok. He’s using Starlink satellite internet to document the trip in real time, posting daily from his sailboat — which is also called Phoenix, named after his cat.
“For five days, I was fighting for my life and going viral at the same time,” he told KGW of his internet fame. “I haven’t really had time to process it.”
Widger said he plans to stay in Hawaii for six months, then continue on to French Polynesia. His dream is to sail around the world.
Follow the journey: