The fact that Rocky and Kirsten Roos are snowbirds who like to spend at least part of their winters in St. Augustine doesn’t make them unique.

Thousands of people make the annual migration from the frigid winters of the north to the sunny beaches of Florida. But what sets them apart is where they live when they get here — onboard "Night Music," a 44-foot sailboat moored in the Matanzas River near downtown St. Augustine.

The couple is part of a small but connected community that has chosen to leave behind possessions and homes and condos for the freedom and peace of life on the water.

“You can change your front and backyard whenever you feel like it,” said Kirsten Roos as she sat with her husband in the cockpit of the Bristol blue-water boat.

“If you don’t like your neighbors, you can move,” Rocky Roos chimed in.

The idea of living on a boat came to now 62-year-old Rocky Roos years ago when he and his wife were vacationing on a beach in Magens Bay in the U.S. Virgin Islands. As they sat on a the crowded beach, they watched as four people hopped on a sailboat anchored in the bay and sailed away.

“I looked at Kirsten and said ‘I want to do that,'" Rocky Roos said.

But boat life didn’t happen right away. First, Kirsten had to come to terms with her fear of sailing that started when she was 19 years old. Back then, she was part of a crew that attempted to sail from Guam to California. The boat ran into some nasty weather that broke the mast, totaled the boat and left a scar.

“The next 20 years I wasn’t really feeling like sailing,” Kirsten Roos said.

But enough time had passed so the couple saved up their money for 10 years by living simply and staying in a smaller home while taking sailing classes along the way. When Rocky Roos retired from his job as an engineer at a power plant in 2014, they made the leap. They sold their home but held on to their remote 14-by-18-foot cabin in Alaska. Then they bought the boat for $130,000 — which came equipped with two bedrooms, two bathrooms with compost toilets, a small galley and teak wood-filled sitting area — and set sail.

They have learned a lot since setting out on the water.

“In my opinion, there are three types of people that would do well living on a sailboat — either like us, where one of us knows how to fix things, has a mechanical background, or is willing to learn those things,” said Kirsten Roos, 48, who taught middle school in Alaska. “Or you have enough money to pay someone to do it, or you live very simply and don’t have a lot of complex systems, like have a small boat with minimal technology.”

The other lesson was cost. Rocky Roos said the adage that you will spend about 50 percent of boat’s purchase value in getting it ready is pretty accurate. Plus, expect to spend close to 15 percent of the cost of the boat every year in maintenance, he said.

“It’s the most money you are ever going to spend going somewhere for free,” Rocky Roos said.

The cost also includes paying to moor at the St. Augustine Municipal Marina, where they have been for the last two months. It costs $15.75 per foot, per month to stay more than three consecutive months, which works out to $693 for a boat the size of the Roos’. They wouldn’t trade it for the world.

“As much as it’s complicated by a lot of systems to maintain, it’s also a very simple lifestyle,” Kirsten said. “You are limited by how much stuff you can bring on board which is actually really liberating.”

Jaye Lunsford didn’t feel liberated when she and her husband Dan first decided to move onto a sailboat in the early 2000s.

“Initially it was very disorienting,” she said. “So many of the things we had came with memories attached. Getting rid of those things just felt rootless.”

Eventually she adapted. Now only the most important things in her life occupy Cinderella, the 33-foot boat where she and her husband live full-time at the docks of the municipal marina. The photos are scanned, the books are on her Kindle, but her father’s fountain pen is tucked away for safekeeping.

“Every single thing we have is fantastically beautiful, sentimental or super useful. The stuff I am emotionally attached to now would all fit in a backpack,” said Jaye Lunsford, 65.

She and her husband, who were both engineers by trade, made the choice to move when Jaye’s job with the federal government took her from Lansing, Michigan, to Washington.

“For the price of a three-bedroom house on the river in Lansing we could have a studio apartment with a view of a brick wall in Washington, D.C.,” Jaye Lunsford said. “We were going to have the boat anyways so we just parked it in Annapolis, sold the house and never bought another one. We just want to fill our lives more with adventures and less with things.”

The self-proclaimed “Trekkies” who love their close connection to the water now live in St. Augustine full-time when they are not sailing up and down the East Coast or part of the crew of the El Galeón during the summer. The risk of hurricane season is real, and there was damage to the marina during Irma, but they love the history of the area and the sailing community in the city.

"We just haven’t found a place we like better," Jaye Lunsford said.

Every week there is a gathering of boaters, or “cruisers,” at Ann O'Malley's Irish Pub that draws anywhere from 20 to 50 people depending on the time of the year.

“This is our favorite city anywhere in the United States ... If the water here was like it was in the Bahamas, I would never leave St. Augustine,” said Kirsten Roos, who spends about six months of every year on the boat with her husband. “The boating community here is amazing.”

Both boating couples said they will keep living the boat life for as long as they can.

“We keep saying every day, if we are happy, we are going to keep doing it,” Kirsten Roos said. “The whole thing is to be true to yourself.”