About Us
Who We Are
Pelagic Medical is a physician-founded offshore maritime medical company providing medical kits, physician access services, and clinical training for blue-water passage-makers.
We were founded on a simple observation: the gap between the medical preparedness most offshore vessels carry and what is actually required when the nearest hospital is days away is wide, dangerous, and entirely closeable. Closing that gap is what we do.
Our founders bring together board-certified surgical expertise, combat medicine experience, critical care nursing, seamanship, and a genuine love of blue-water cruising. We are not a medical supply company that discovered boating. We are mariners, travellers, and surgeons who built the medical system we wanted on our own vessels — and decided others deserved access to it too.
To give blue-water passage-makers the medical equipment, training, and physician guidance they need to handle emergencies at sea with confidence — and to get their crew home safe.
Our Founders
Pelagic Medical was built by people who spend time in remote places.
Kai grew up on the water in the Salish Sea of the Pacific Northwest, where a love of the ocean was woven into early life alongside an equal fascination with how things work and how to fix them when they don’t.
As a board-certified cardiac and general surgeon, Kai has practiced medicine in some of the most challenging environments on earth — Iraq, Myanmar, and across sub-Saharan Africa — where resourcefulness, calm under pressure, and the ability to act decisively with limited equipment are not aspirational qualities but daily requirements.
Kai is also a pilot and mariner who earned his Canadian captains license while in University. The intersection of technical skill, clinical judgment, and a deep respect for what the ocean demands of anyone who ventures far from shore is the foundation on which Pelagic Medical was built.
Pelagic Medical exists because Kai looked at what was available to offshore passage-makers in a medical emergency and decided it wasn’t good enough.
Michael Meyer brings a career’s worth of surgical precision and hard-won operational experience to Pelagic Medical. As a board-certified cardiac surgeon and retired U.S. Army surgeon with multiple combat deployments, Michael has operated in conditions that would be unrecognizable to most hospital-based physicians.
Military medicine at the forward edge teaches a particular set of skills: triage without adequate information, intervention with limited supplies, and decision-making under pressure with lives directly at stake. Those skills translate directly to the offshore environment, where the vessel master faces analogous decisions without a surgical team, a trauma bay, or a helicopter on standby.
Michael’s role at Pelagic Medical is to ensure that every protocol, every kit configuration, and every piece of clinical guidance we provide reflects the standard of care that serious offshore medicine demands — not what is convenient or commercially expedient.
Miko is the person who makes Pelagic Medical training actually work. With a background in ICU and perioperative nursing and a natural gift for education, she has spent her career translating complex clinical skills into knowledge that non-medical people can absorb, retain, and use under pressure.
She leads all Pelagic Medical clinical training courses — bleeding control, wound care and suturing, IV access, urethral catheterization — bringing the same patience, precision, and warmth to a nervous first-time student as she does to a seasoned mariner who just needs a refresher before a long passage.
Miko understands that the best medical training happens when people feel safe enough to make mistakes in the classroom so they don’t make them at sea. Her courses are serious without being intimidating, and her students leave with real skills and the confidence to use them.
Why We Do This
Blue-water passage-making attracts a particular kind of person: capable, self-reliant, comfortable with calculated risk, and deeply respectful of the sea. These are people who would never leave the dock without redundant navigation, a properly stocked tool kit, and a thorough understanding of their vessel’s systems.
And yet the medical kit on most offshore vessels is an afterthought. A few bandages, some seasickness pills, and a first aid manual written for day sailors. It is not adequate for a crew member with a serious laceration three days from the nearest port. It is not adequate for urinary retention, a cardiac event, or a fracture sustained in heavy weather.
We know this because we have been in those situations. We have also been the physicians on the other end of calls from people in exactly those circumstances, trying to guide untrained crew through procedures with equipment that was never designed for the task.
Pelagic Medical exists to change that. Our systems are built by surgeons for offshore use. Our training is designed by an ICU nurse who believes everyone can learn. Our physician access program puts a doctor in your corner before, during, and after your passage.
Any of our products and services can be tailored to your crew, your vessel, and your cruising plans. We are here to help. Reach out.