BOAT LIFE: Raw and Unfiltered In The Bahamas

Good morning. It is a beautiful day in the Eleuthera Islands and today we're going to show you what a day in the life looks like living on a sailboat in the Bahamas. Good morning puppy. Good morning. Hi. A necessity every morning, puppy cuddles. We're anchored at Egg Island and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Egg Island Well if you are new here we are called Emily Cruz and we are on a mission to sail the world. We quit our corporate jobs, bought a sailboat with no sailing experience and well it's coffee time. Yes guys I actually make the bed every morning before I get up and going for the day because I do believe that a clean boat is a happy boat. This is actually something I started doing last year when we did our first day in the life video and I told you guys I was going to try to be better about it. Well it's now become a habit and it just makes me feel so good every time I come downstairs to see the beds all made and it's that first simple task in the morning that I can accomplish. So I'm curious do you guys at home do you make your bed every morning? If so leave a comment below I'd love to hear about it. What was that? You know one of the biggest questions we get all the time is where does Dixie go to the bathroom and how did we get her to use the restroom on the boat? The best solution is always to take her to land and we try to do that at least once a day especially for her frisbee. She loves her frisbee time. When we can't take her to land and she does have to potty on the boat well... Hi puppy good morning good morning you want to go potty? Go potty! Good girl! Of course we always spray it off. We always wash down the trampoline with some good old Dawn dish soap because if it's good for the ducks it's good for us right? So let's talk about Dixie going to the potty and how we got her to go and be so comfortable up here. We did talk to a veterinarian before doing this because we knew that it was going to be an issue and one of the things that we did was we didn't take her to land because every single time she would wait and she would just hold it and hold it and hold it until we would take her to land. And we get to the point where we felt so bad about her holding it that we needed we just we broke down and we had to take her every single time. I end up doing laps with her around the boat to just I think we did I don't know 10, 15, 20 times around the boat and every time I would stop and tell her to go potty on the trampoline and so she finally went and we gave her peanut butter and we told her it was okay and you could just tell that she felt so bad about it. But once she finally went we made her go to the bathroom for four days consecutive before we would take her to land and ever since then she's been perfect. She will go to the bathroom on the front of the boat on command anytime doesn't matter what day of the week it is or how rough it is as long as it's not splashing up underneath the trampoline she'll go which is amazing. It's time to get ready for the day. So this is my morning facial routine. I take some witch hazel rub all around. Next up I put some niacinamide serum on. It's got a little bit of zinc in it as well so niacinamide is great for hydration and since we are always in the sun and salt water hydration is good. You too Mr. Cruz, you need hydration. Oh oh I can just feel the hydration coming in. Next up is my sunscreen. I like this stream to see everyday mineral sunscreen that's tinted. We are not sponsored. I just really love the product. I've been using it for over a year now. It does a really great job. It is reef friendly and you got to be careful when you are looking at quote reef friendly sunscreens because a lot of them will sneak in avobenzone which is an ingredient which is bad for the reef. Also a known endocrine disruptor. So this has a 19% zinc oxide non-nano zinc so that's what you want to look for when you're looking for reef safe. It's good for the environment also good for your skin. Got some turkey bacon for breakfast this morning. We're going to leave it in the bucket here by the time I have our coffee going and so forth. I'll come back out and this will be defrosted and ready to go. Ready for some breakfast? Wait. Go eat. While we're finishing up our breakfast I want to tell you a little bit where we are at Egg Island. So it's just off the coast of North Eleuthera and it's the last uninhabited island in the chain here and actually served as the landing spot for the first European settlers who shipwrecked in the Devil's Backbone back in the 1600s. I think I read 1648 and the Devil's Backbone is actually somewhere that we went last year. There's been more shipwrecks in the Devil's Backbone than anywhere in the entire Bahamas. So you got to think in the 1600s when people are coming here in these big ships with these really deep drafts and they didn't have GPS systems and the technology that we have today. So there are shipwrecks all throughout the Devil's Backbone. So this place here at Egg Island was that landing spot for them when they shipwrecked and it's also known here to be a nesting site for sea turtles. So after we get our work done today we're going to go do a little dive and hopefully see some turtles and anything else out there. Before we really get going with the day I always like to try to just do a quick vacuum of the cabin and the salon area. It doesn't happen every day but I try to most every day just do a quick little clean. I have to say our washer and dryer on board is by far the most underrated piece of equipment we have on board. When we got the boat this was already on it thankfully which was absolutely amazing and we said yeah we probably won't use it. It's kind of small like how big of a deal is it to go to land and do laundry? Y'all let me tell you this is incredible. I do laundry about once a week for our clothes basically just when the basket fills up to keep it all at bay and then every so like week and a half I'll wash our sheets and our towels. Oh and one more thing I want to add while I'm thinking about it. For all of you who say you just need the washer not the dryer, this guy is a combo washer dryer. It's all great and all to hang your clothes out on the line until it's 100% humidity and your towel is soaking wet and not getting dry and who wants to get out of the shower and wrap around in a wet stinky towel? That is like the grossest thing ever. So when we have days on the boat where it's just like sticky all outside our towels don't dry and it's so yucky. Sometimes after getting out of the shower if the weather is that way I'll just pop them in the dryer and then I have a dry towel and a dry towel stays cleaner longer. So there's that for what it's worth. Voila! First thing I typically do is start replying back to all of the comments that we get on our YouTube channel. Carolyn underscore S. I just found your channel. I'm super excited to watch your past videos and catch up on your background and your next adventure. Safe travels. Thank you so much Carolyn if you are watching this. That is actually an older video of ours called Doc Life um and so I'm happy that you are finding us from our old videos. Chopin smoothers? Uh what do you do for a living? Well that's one of the videos that we plan on answering as we finish our taxes for this year because not only do we want to give you guys information about what we do to make money but also how much money we're making here on our boat. So we just finished our flotilla in the Abacos. We have another one coming up in November in St. Vincent that we are super excited to partner with Barefoot Yacht Charters and if anyone is interested in coming sailing with us that is one way that we actually do make money. These are curated week-long sailing adventures that we are taking a group on. We'd love for you to join us. Cabins start as low as three thousand dollars. While Cole is doing his work up here I'm going to take you downstairs to what I like to call my hobbit hole. We've tried to implement what we're calling a new rule but it doesn't always work. So we've tried to limit our daytime admin hours till about 11 o'clock or noon because it's really hard to go diving in the dark or do adventurous things in the dark. So that just allows us to get off the boat, get away from work and the computer and go film videos, go diving, go fishing, whatever the case may be. It's just something that has helped us stay on track and create some boundaries with work. So always something to fix on the boat so being that this is the day in the life video it's time to fix something. Yesterday our water maker stopped working it immediately went into an alarm and we only have a quarter tank of water left so I've got to get it figured out first. Gotta get our headlamp. So I'm gonna run it manually for a minute I'm gonna check it for see if there's any air in the system first. I'm opening up this pressure relief valve for a minute. So our water maker for those of you who haven't seen our boat tour video is underneath our aft port cabin or our guest cabin bed and we have a Spectra Newport 400. It's the MK2 version which is an automated version and it's supposed to do everything for you which it does. It will test the water, it will reject the water if the salinity is too high, it will then have it has an automated valve once the salinity is low enough it will flip over and then send that water the good water to our tanks. You've just got to really know it and know when it's working. Most of the time a good flush through the system of fresh water will solve a lot of the problems. Our salinity is actually a little bit high right now it's at 452 parts per million which is actually a lot high. So I'm gonna keep an eye on that. All right so it's been about 20 minutes now that we've had the water maker running and it's continuing to drop with the salinity. So now I'm showing 216 parts per million and with every five minutes it's dropping quite a bit. Cole makes the best fish sandwiches but today we're missing a few ingredients. So if you saw last week's video then you know that we caught two beautiful mahi-mahi and we had these in the freezer so I went ahead and pulled them out and we are going to make mahi-mahi fish sandwiches for lunch today. Unfortunately I'm improvising a little bit. I love on my fish sandwiches to have lettuce tomato and cucumber on them but I don't have lettuce tomato or cucumber. So I'm going to throw a little bit of a green bell pepper with some butter in the pan. I'm gonna cook that down a little bit. It's gonna give it a nice little crunch in the sandwich which I'm missing from my lettuce and cucumber. But I'm also gonna make a garlic jalapeno butter sauce that I'm gonna put on top of the bread before I toast it. And then of course I think every good fish sandwich comes with pepper jack cheese so we do have pepper jack cheese. And then we have a secret ingredient here that we put on everything. The good old Chick-fil-a sauce. If you don't like Chick-fil-a sauce we can't be friends. So I found that the key for us is to make sure the fish is completely dry before seasoning and before dropping into the pan. I've got my butter nice and hot. And we've got three nice pieces of mahi. That is the best mahi mahi sandwich you will find on this boat with our current ingredients. Dinner is served. Guys I don't know about you but this is what we call ocean to table lunch and I am so happy to be trying this. Now that lunch is over it is time for my job to kick in which is dish duty. Well guys with any good boat day comes chores and today we are cleaning the hull. When cleaning the hull you want to have a full hood on because we've seen our friends in the past specifically Captain Cole get crabs in his ear from scrubbing the bottom of the boat. Little baby tiny crabs. So I'm going to make sure my ears are all covered up. To hold yourself against the boat and also working the brush this is a workout. This dinghy has got to be replaced. I've got a hole in the dinghy. I know exactly where the hole is but I've patched it three different times and because of the location of it I just cannot get a patch to plug it. It's a slow leak but it does require a good pumping every 12 hours or so. It's nice and firm now but we'll have to pump it up again tomorrow. We have our patrons Tom and Cheryl who if you've been following along you saw them in our leopard delivery video as well as our life on the dock video back in November of 2022 before we ever left the dock for full time and so they're here. They're going to do some fishing so we're going to see who can who can come home with dinner tonight. It's either you guys with Rod and Rio or it's us with the spears. Losers have to cook. We are diving on Egg Reef and that is the northernmost island of the Eleuthera chain and this is a big reef so I'm excited to get underneath the water and see what we have. You know Emily and I love our spearfishing so not only are we going to try and show you guys some amazing underwater footage we're also going to see what we can find for dinner while underneath the water. We got a porgy before. Yeah. This has been on my wish list for a while because these fish spook so easy. I've never been able to get close. Anytime I equalize they're like gone. Another porgy and to my point before when I equalize it spooks them so I was trying to equalize early so then I could get down there and turn on him but nevertheless he was still gone. He was not going to stick around to play. Guys I just absolutely live for days like today. It's days like today that make me so sad to ever leave the Bahamas because in my mind like how does it get any better than this? Like it's just amazing. I'm just so thankful to get to be in the water and for this great weather. You know I think the reason why I love freediving so much is it's like a brain vacation for me. It's the only time really I think in my entire life I found that I'm like truly in the moment. I'm not thinking about what's the next YouTube video or how can we grow or you know what are we gonna do tomorrow? Like I'm literally just completely in the moment and it's just the coolest thing ever. I'm focusing on my breath and what I'm seeing and when we're spearfishing I'm looking for fish and it's like a giant I spy game for me and I always loved I spy as a kid and I just think it's so cool because when you first get in you're like oh there's not anything here and if you just like stop and pause you just watch the reef come to life and it it's so cool. I just hope I can capture it well enough on camera for you so you can experience what that's like at home behind the screen. Oh I love days like today. What a beautiful day this is. So we got some strawberry groupers. We got a little muck. And because we spearfished and they did not catch any that means they're cooking dinner for us tonight. I think we kind of invited ourselves over. Dixie you want to go to the beach? All right stay right there, stay right there. Dixie go, Dixie go. Go for a swim. You can do it, go. You want your frisbee? You want your frisbee? Time for a land potty. I am ready for a nice dinner and knowing Cheryl it's going to be really good. Dixie just jumped right on. I am making a cheap version of uh we're calling it egg island fish mochiko. So mochiko and I'm cheating. This is a mix. Mochiko is a Japanese sweet rice flour. So normally it's a batter but we found that if we use it like flour, I hit the fish with olive oil, we rolled it in the flour and then we fried it. It was enough because we like to taste the fish not necessarily. Just the breading yeah. Yeah. So for those of you that watched our mackerel poke bowl video a couple weeks ago, you'll know that Cheryl is actually the the one that gave us the crunchy garlic oil sauce. And the pepper, assorted pepper powder that went on top of our poke bowls. And she shared that little secret with us. Someone actually messaged, I forget the name, but someone commented on the video wanting to know the name of that oil. Did we ever figure out the name of that? It's the initials S and B. Yeah and you can find it on Amazon but it's a crunchy garlic and chili oil. Yeah. We have had such a great day and now are so excited to be enjoying a meal with our patrons Tom and Cheryl. Hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, please leave a comment below and make sure to hit that subscribe button. It helps us so much more than you realize. We'll see you next week.