When retired Navy SEAL Sniper School grad and head instructor Brandon Webb first decided that “This is the life for me” as described in June 2015 Men’s Journal:
The same could be said for Webb’s upbringing. Born in 1974, he and his younger sister Maryke were raised in British Columbia, on a remote cattle ranch without running water or electricity. Webb’s father, Jack, had met his mother, Lynn Merriam, while working as a landscaper in Los Angeles. A year later they married, moved to the ranch to start their own construction business, and had Webb. “We lived way out in the woods with wolves, coyotes, and bears,” Merriam says. “I was washing Brandon’s diapers in the lake.”
By the time Webb was 13, the family lived in a large house across the border, in Everett, Washington, when the construction business took a dive. “We were building a big project for someone, they pulled out, and we were left holding the bag,” Merriam says. “We lost everything.” So the family moved into their 47-foot Agio sailboat and became gypsies, moving to a harbor in Ventura, California. Webb began working part-time on the Peace, a 70-foot charter dive-and-spearfishing vessel with a hot tub on its deck, captained by a middle-aged divorcé named Bill Magee. “Bill was kind of like a seafaring Hugh Hefner,” Webb says. “You’d walk to the boat, and he’s got his superhot stripper girlfriend in the hot tub half-naked while he’s winking at me and drinking a gin and tonic.” Magee took weekend fishermen out to sea in pursuit of lobster, tuna, and yellowtail while blaring the theme to Rawhide. “I learned how to captain a boat, scuba dive, drink, and play poker,” Webb says. “Older women were hitting on me — it was crazy.”
When Webb turned 16, his parents uprooted the family again to realize a long-held dream — sailing to start a new life in New Zealand. But after pushing off from shore in Ventura, things unraveled fast. The kids resented being pulled from their friends, and Webb fought with his father over control of the ship. “I had a lot more boating experience, had a problem with following rules, and it drove me nuts when somebody wasn’t doing something the right way,” Webb says. “My dad was like, ‘You’re under my roof — I don’t care what you say.’ ” In Tahiti, after 30 days at sea, Webb and his father argued over an accident with the anchor — and finally came to blows. “Jack was really mad and had Brandon’s back up against the boat’s stairway,” Merriam says, “and I remember thinking, ‘Brandon can take his dad.’ ” Webb says the loss of the family business and his own coming of age rattled his father. “I couldn’t wait to get off that boat.” So he did. Webb’s parents found passage for him with a family sailing to Honolulu, gave him money for a plane ticket back to Ventura, and arranged for him to live aboard the Peace while going to school. “I cried myself to sleep every night for weeks,” Webb says, “and then realized, OK, I’ve got to rely on myself from here.”
Back in Ventura, he dedicated himself to diving and spearfishing. At night, he would descend 80 feet, take off his scuba tanks, and crawl into holes to retrieve 10-pound lobsters. By day, he would free-dive 30 feet below the surface to stalk 50-pound halibut with a speargun. “You’ve got to have a pretty good set of balls to do that stuff,” Magee says, “but he wasn’t scared of it.” One day a group of SEALs rented out the Peace, noticed Webb’s skills in the water, and said he should enlist. “I was looking for a way out and thought the SEALs sounded badass,” Webb says. “I was like, ‘This is the life for me.’ ”
