REALITIES of BOAT LIFE_ Watch Before You Buy!

Curiosity is a strange thing that drives us to make all sorts of nonsensical decisions. Four years ago we bought a sailboat but we didn't have a clue how to sail it. So we hired a captain to come aboard and show us the ropes which we quickly learned aren't ropes. When they're on a boat it's called lines because well sailors are funny like that and they have their own language and they don't take kindly to those who don't speak it. Take your main sheet off your winch and then you can put your main halyard on your winch. And that was it. We set off around the world and now we're living the dream. Go fishing. We just gotta put the new one in. How do you use these? It has to be pretty even. I hope I never have to do this again. Huh yeah yeah it wasn't that simple. Not at all. Nope uh but I mean look we didn't grow up with any sort of sailing background. I mean we didn't grow up near water. I didn't even know anybody with a pool. Geez but we knew we had a lot to learn and before we even stepped foot on our very first catamaran before we really started the buying process we stopped at this little park and recorded this video about our thoughts expectations and uncertainties of what boat life was going to be like. Exactly and it's funny to go back and watch that now because we got some of it right or close. We think our whole life is going to be all anchoring out in these absolutely beautiful locations living completely off the grid with all of our solar all that stuff we already have and I guess that's that's the most exciting part. Yes but it's also one of the scary things and there's a lot of crap we just didn't even think about. But what else do you expect? I mean we didn't know anything. No but that's what we wanted to talk about today. If we could go back in time and give ourselves some advice you know what is the stuff that we wish we would have known. Learning how to sail is easy. The act of sailing getting a boat to move is not hard. It's really simple. How's the sail look? Yeah good? It's like a lot of new hands. But trimming sails perfectly, sailing like a pro, sailing safely, that's a different story. Right. Four years ago me was thinking we can figure that out we've read enough books we've we've read enough blogs we can we can figure out how to sail we don't need to take a class. Well or like we'll learn as we go kind of thing we'll figure it out and the only reason we ended up taking a course not the only reason but it prompted us to is because once we found out that insurance was going to require us to have a captain sign off on us saying that well we could actually sail the boat then we were like okay well maybe we should take that class and that was the best five days that we spent like we learned so much and the sailing language the sailing lingo it's like a block is a pulley and a line is a rope and what the heck is a jibe or a jib it's like yeah so there's all these things that you have to learn and things are called different names and school helps out loads with that so a lot to take in and it fast-tracked big time versus if we would have tried to do it without the class because there's so many rules regulations you know how to read a chart finding anchorages so much of that is learned in class prepare to head up to a close hauled sail if i could have looked at the thing the whole time it would have been easy i was trying to you know you know why do you think she put a cheat sheet so we took the asa courses which is the american sailing association but pretty much every country has their own version of that it's a good place to start and we bought the boat and then signed up for class but in hindsight i would have told us to take the class first and then go boat shopping because the knowledge we learned in class would have helped us out not tremendously but it would have helped it would have helped i mean i think that we would have looked at it a little bit differently i'm still very happy with our boat choice it's just it would have been nice to know to know what things were that we're looking at it would have been nice to be able to actually sail our own vessel we couldn't even do that on our own we had to wait until after we got done with school before we were ever even allowed to take it anywhere so i mean look we did things a little boat life is a full-time job just kind of let that marinate for a second it's a full-time job everything on a boat takes twice as long it just does here we go again this will be the second time i've installed the stainless steel holding tank jason has been working on that toilet or head for umteen hours now and he's not happy about it but he has done it searching for the boat took twice as long as we thought it would have and getting service done getting it outfitted to sail around the world took two or three or four times longer yeah even just once you're on the boat then you've got route planning we use inavix and garmin that way we have two different charts to double check everything captain and even though we're several days away from leaving we're just kind of generally doing our our route planning on predict win just to kind of have an idea of where the wind's coming from how long will take us to get there other things we have to think about cdc uh website website cats uh yep looking at the pet health information and what's required for entering the country customs customs for us what's required from us and uh checking procedures yeah checking out here we have to check out here a certain way so anyway it's just so different than our old life in the rv we used to just bring up the jacks bring in the slides and just point the rv and go like without a care planning a simple a to b destination is never a simple a to b destination with sailing but it's because the act of getting there the sail itself all that time in between is a huge part of the journey that is an adventure in itself then you got to check in you got to go through customs and visas and all the bureaucracy that goes along with that and that all takes time and then the simplicity of everyday living so going to the grocery store it is a trunk full of vegetables right there and fruit getting fuel running basic errands laundry like for whatever reason all well not for whatever reason i mean you've got all the time to take the dinghy from the boat to land go and get your groceries then bring them back to the dinghy and then back to the boat and so on and so forth it's like just everything compiles and it all just takes longer so be prepared for that old me or young me however i'm supposed to talk to you it's gonna take you longer way longer than you ever imagined and then because boat life is a full-time job if you're thinking like we were that you can balance a normal job a digital nomad job where you work from the sea that complicates it even more yeah because now you have two full-time jobs all right back inside so it's just you need to plan for a lot more time and we certainly didn't so i would say double the time you think it's going to take you to do everything yeah maybe even triple you know just to give yourself a little leeway because i will say that there have been times where our visa was expiring when we needed to get out of ecuador so we had to set sail we're prepping for the biggest adventure of our lives we're sailing from Salinas ecuador to the marquesas islands in french polynesia it's a 3 500 nautical mile journey that will take anywhere from 20 to 30 days we leave in exactly eight days because that's when our ecuador visas expire and this is our prime weather window ocean passages are dictated by seasons if we wait too long the cyclone season will be upon us and we'll have to wait another year before making the passage which means we have a lot to accomplish over the next eight days what are you angry about i'm not angry what are you pissed off stupid alternator you don't want to do that to yourself if you don't have to because we didn't think it was going to take us as long to get prepared to leave and so more time more time which brings us right to the next time is money and money is a resource and if you don't have enough of that resource then you gotta get it from somewhere and that's most likely gonna come in the form of you yeah sweat equity how much blood sweat and tears do you want to put into your vessel into your home and i would say that no matter what you're gonna put a lot of blood sweat and tears into it because you probably won't have a choice part of the lifestyle but certainly the less money you have the more time you're gonna have to invest or if you don't have a lot of time then you better have some money because you're gonna need to pay somebody else to do all of that maintenance and upgrades and everything else that goes on yeah and there's kind of a general rule that we've been told that most people read about the yearly cost of maintenance for your boat you should plan on 10 to 30 percent of the value of your boat and that's like you're like what what that's that's not even yeah so if you have a hundred thousand dollar boat ten percent would be ten thousand dollars and thirty percent would obviously be thirty thousand dollars that's a huge variant the less work you do yourself the more you pay somebody else you get closer to the thirty percent and the more you're willing to do yourself you get closer to the ten and that seems to kind of work with all aspects of boat life i feel like that's the thing the more work you do yourself the cheaper it will be yeah so keep that in mind when planning your budget and we certainly didn't allot for enough time or enough money and a general rule of thumb for money just take whatever budget you have and double it yeah take whatever time it's gonna take and double it is there a yeah you're gonna need more time and money pretty much or more time and more time or more money and more money the sunset is getting oh my gosh really good we might have to take a mini break i don't know because i'm like then it's going to be dark when we come back you will become handy and jason i'm talking to you remember that time you were on the side of the road and you couldn't figure out how to run your electric tire pump in alaska if you've seen our how not to videos then you kind of know why i'm nervous i gotta turn it on point made yeah yeah you'll be changing engines out in no time changing engines yeah engine parts working on the the oily stuff the greasy getting down in there you're gonna be the man what no we do all right we'll figure it out i would not be calling us rock stars on maintenance or fixing crap let me have my light honey come on oh yeah you do a very good job very good job you learn as you go and it's a little bit frustrating and trying but you will learn and the best part is you don't have to learn all by yourself because the cruising community is really awesome whether it's like forums or youtube videos of somebody showing you how to do something local nets that come across the radio like people trading parts and helping each other out it's it is amazing you don't have to know everything no and if you stocked up on every single spare except for that one thing that inevitably broke go ask your neighbor they might have it maybe they know how to fix it if you don't know how to fix it like they really are so incredibly helpful and everybody's out there doing the same thing so we're all pretty understanding uh so i would say that we've probably been helped more than we've been helpful but maybe our turn is coming when this traveler broke it kind of squeezed these two pieces together so now we have to open them back up a little bit because um we actually have the pen that can go in why do we have the pen because of our friends on holiday they're supposed to be on holiday and he's over here working and even simple things that you know you take for granted and on land is having someone change your oil and stuff like that like it doesn't really exist when you're out in the middle of the islands with no real services so you are sort of forced to do it but it is easy and you can totally do it oh but the one thing the one information i will give you is if you can stock up on as many stainless steel nuts screws bolts the quality stuff do not buy the cheap stuff because it will just rust and it won't last anyway good wrenches good drills all of that spanning spinners spinning spanners whatever those things are called crescent wrenches of all sorts you just have a good plethora of miscellaneous tools that you can use that are high quality let me just tell you these things extender thingies come in amazingly amazing handy when working in these tight spaces in here so i feel like that covers some i mean we could we would be here all night long but that covers some of the things that i wish we would have known and there are a few more and we're going to kind of like blaster yeah i feel like there should be like a blaster scene but that's probably not going to happen first one is sleeping isn't impossible we really didn't think that sleeping was going to be so easy we thought we were going to just be super sleep deprived we had no idea how on earth we were going to handle passages and sleeping and three hour shifts exactly yeah you read it and as somebody who lives on land and sleeps seven to eight hours a night you think there's no way i can function but you can function you will sleep you'll get used to the noises and the rocking you will be fine your body certainly adjusts and you get in tune with the boat and it just it does work out so don't worry about that but i will say ground tackle is extremely important we held off on upgrading the anchor and the chain not for too long because we learned our lesson very quickly a good anchor is like worth its weight in gold because otherwise you really won't sleep because you're going to be too concerned about dragging or you will be dragging and you're trying to fix that problem so good ground tackle anchor and chain super important super important seasickness you will get seasick and even though nikki doesn't get seasick it doesn't make her a better person than you she you're just as good as her i have a better inner ear that's all that's all no no it happens to many sailors we hear it over and over people just get hit hard with seasickness but then you get over it it's been the craziest 12 hours for me we're here now you can rest yes shower and sleep food maybe if i keep it down it was not a good night for jason i wish i could tell you to take ginger or drink angostura bitters or tell you some sort of magical solution but i think just is what it is you're gonna get seasick yeah you're gonna get over it your life will be fine don't worry about it sturgeon is awesome yeah driving the boat i really thought that jason was just gonna end up being better at most everything than me because he's a better driver in the car so i kind of just assumed he'd be better at driving the boat we're practicing our docking skills and there's no bumpers around here so i'm really hoping we do this right otherwise our boat will suffer but turns out it's it's us you and me and current me it's us we we actually are kind of a boss at the helm yeah you're good yeah yeah no i mean let's not overdo it because i mean i've still never made mistakes and i've done a lot but we did learn it and we are pretty good at the helm and so yeah don't be afraid to get in there girl ac ac wow when your air conditioning breaks in the middle of the and it cost 20 grand to get a couple new ones installed you'll learn very quickly it's not that important no you'll be fine you don't need ac yeah sure it's a luxury and sure it helps like reduce some of the humidity in the boat but you don't need it yeah and whenever your hot water probe stops working and you no longer have hot water you'll also learn that cold showers really aren't that bad especially during the middle of the day i mean you're gonna get out of the shower and you're gonna sweat anyway yeah you'll learn that all sorts of things that you thought you couldn't live without you do just fine without them especially when it costs so much to repair them or replace them like the refrigerator yeah you'll learn that like look an electric cooler works great just fine yeah we could go on and on but that's kind of the the gist of it really in general it's an alternative lifestyle doesn't mean it's easier doesn't mean it's better it's just an alternative and it's up to you to decide whether it's a better alternative for you oh and it's one that we've been away from for a while and i can't tell you how gut-wrenching it is knowing we're so close to our home and so far away so far away like living off the grid living at sea living on anchor it's it is the most amazing thing and i complain sometimes while we're underway but i freaking love it and being away definitely has made us realize how much we miss it when we don't have it when we're not there so we are homesick real bad right homesick right about now uh so it will be a lovely reunion whenever it uh whenever it finally happens so if you're thinking about hitting the sailboat world you know setting sail living off the grid and hitting these anchorages and i hope this video can spark a little bit of excitement help you out a little bit maybe push that rock over the hill yeah or we've just completely scared you away from it wanted to i don't know but look we wouldn't do it if we didn't think it was worth it but i'm gonna circle it back around to you did we miss anything was there some sort of question you have that's like burning a hole in your mind please share in the comments below yeah or if you're a salty sailor and you've actually made it all the way through this and you've got some tips of your own to share definitely leave them down in the comment box below yeah thank you so much for spending time with us thank you for watching and we will see you when we see you the sunset we can get the last of it okay