Living on a Self-Sufficient Sailboat for 10 Years + FULL TOUR

What we really enjoy about cruising is being able to take our house and all its creature comforts and go to an extremely desolate location where we can have the entire beach to ourselves and living off the grid. So we have Delos set up that once we have her provisioned and fueled up, we can be off the grid for anywhere from three to six months. You know, we make our own power with solar and wind. We make our own water with a desalination plant we have on board and we have enough food storage to support us for a long time. And so, you know, we can have a very low impact on the environment. We can move the boat around with the power of the wind and the weather, and it's incredibly sustainable and fulfilling way to travel and live. Over the course of the entire trip, 10 years, we've sailed Delos 83,000 nautical miles, which is the equivalent of circling the earth at the equator just over three times. We've visited six out of the seven continents and sailed in every major ocean in the world. My name is Karin Trautmann and I am born and raised in Sweden. My name is Brian Trautmann and I was raised in Flagstaff, Arizona. This is little Sierra Abbot Trautmann. She is six months old and she is a little sea baby. She loves the ocean and she loves sailboats, huh, Sierra? Yeah. I'm originally a software engineer, but now I am a full-time sailor and YouTube video maker. I knew nothing at all about sailing, but I read lots of books, I read lots of blogs, and I came up with a four-year plan. Basically, at the end of that plan, I sold everything I owned, I sold my house. I bought a sailboat named Delos and I took off on what was supposed to be an 18-month sailing trip headed towards New Zealand. I was studying landscape architecture in Australia and went on a backpacking trip to New Zealand where I met Brian and he asked me if I wanted to go sailing for the weekend. And that was nine years ago now. Yeah, I never left. I had never sailed before and it was absolutely life-changing. I fell in love with it straight away. And of course, fell in love with Brian too. Welcome to our home, Delos. She is a 53-foot sloop rig catch, which means that she has two masts and one forestay. And right now we're in the cockpit of Delos, which is like the brain of the boat is how I like to think of it. This is our navigation and steering station. What I like about it is the helm is super protected so we can sit here, we can drive here, we have an excellent view and you can stay safe, you can stay dry, you can stay very comfortable even when the conditions are wet and completely handle all the sails and drive the boat. Back here, we have some more sail controls all in the cockpit. So to sail Delos, we actually never have to leave this area which makes her a very safe boat when we're sailing shorthanded and when the weather gets bad or you're sailing at nighttime, you don't wanna leave the cockpit and risk falling overboard. So it's a very cool area. When we're not sailing, this is also where we spend most of our time. So this happens to be really our outside porch, our living room and everything sort of all rolled into one. So welcome into our kitchen. This is really a one man kitchen or one woman kitchen. It's not really big enough for two people and it's kind of narrow, which makes it really good when we're on the ocean passage and it's really rough. So you can hold yourself in, you also have this so you can clip yourself in. So in case it is really rough, you don't go flying across the whole boat. We have everything that you would find in a normal kitchen, I would say. We have, you know, pool sinks. We have an induction stove, which is very, very nice. So we don't have to worry about propane and stuff. We have just a normal little oven and it's all kind of attached to a gimbal system. So when we're healing, this stove can swing with pretty good force and we won't lose our dinner on the floor. Up here we have a toaster, which is a bit of a luxury and we have some fresh potatoes, onions and stuff like that. Things that don't need to be refrigerated. It's kind of like a puzzle. So everything like the pots and the pans have its place. And if you put it in the wrong place, the things won't fit in there. We also have a cabinet here that is a bunch of random things and it kind of just extends down. You never know really what to find down there. It's a bit of a surprise. Here we have, you know, our bowls and our plates and our sauces, you know, just normal stuff. Cutlery. This is our fridge. Yeah, for being a boat, I would say it's a very nice fridge. Most fridges on boats are top loading and I have not heard one single good thing about a top loading fridge. So it's very nice when it has a door and you can have everything like organized in there. One other thing that I'm extremely happy about, it's our washing machine. It's just the smallest one that you can find on the market basically. But we do run it every second day to do the diapers for Sierra because we use cloth diapers on her to save a lot of trash. And I would not want to wash it by hand. So I'm very happy about this feature. Another feature is her little chair that we have strapped in right here. So she can sit here and eat and be part of, you know, like us making dinner and stuff like that. This is the navigation, communication and electronics station on Delos. This is our single sideband radio. So this is a ham radio and it allows us to communicate via voice and also an analog modem via email for thousands of miles. So if all the communication systems ever go down and Armageddon happens, we can still talk to other people out there. We have our VHF radio that allows us to communicate like close distances, basically line of sight boat instruments. This gives us our speed and the depth. And then down here, this is maybe the craziest thing that most boats aren't going to have. This is the server rack that I installed for the satellite communication system. So this is what allows us to basically beam internet to us from space anywhere in the world. We have a couple of safety devices, so fire extinguisher, and this is an EPIRB, stands for emergency position indicating radio beacon. And so if we're ever sailing in the middle of the ocean and we have a life-threatening situation, the boat is on fire, the boat is sinking, something like that, we can activate this by pulling this cord in the back. It has a built-in GPS and it transmits our position and our boat name and who we are to a satellite in orbit. And then it's picked up by the closest maritime authority and they will route like a coast guard if they're available or a container ship or a cargo ship or something to try and help us. So over here, this is our water gauge. So it's super simple. We carry a thousand liters of water on Delos. Right now we have 500 liters. And when we fill our tank up, it's enough water to last us for almost a month. This water maker is capable of making 200 liters or approximately 50 US gallons an hour. So this is our living room. This is basically where we do most of the things when we're inside of the boat. You know, eating, we work here, you know, lounge around. It can fit a lot of people, which is very nice. And we have a lot of crew on board. One other thing that I really love with Delos is that we have so much food storage. This is all food and stuff. And if you come down here, inside the sofa, we have freezers. It's a bit empty right now because we haven't shopped in about a month, but it is really, really cool to have freezers like this because if we catch a really big fish or if we're going off grid for a long time, you know, it's important to have some good food frozen. So we have two of those on each side of the sofa. On this side right now is Sierra's play area. As she's getting bigger, it's been a bit challenging with her starting to climb over things and stuff. So we have sewn a little, they don't like to call it cage, but it's a playpen. So we can close this up. She can still be part of the action because you can see through it. We can leave her in there if we need to do something like change the sails or something is going on where she needs to be put in a safe place. This is where we put her. Do you think she likes it? No. So if you lift this up, this is canned food, milks. All the floors really lift up and it's deep builders. So all the canned foods, we named them all so you can easily see what's inside. And we take the labels off to prevent the spread of cockroaches. So that's the procedure, but it works well. And we don't have cockroaches right now, which is very, very nice. One of the things that I had never thought about when I first moved on to Delos nine years ago was when you go off grid and you run out of food, that's it. There's no more getting more when you're out there. There is no store close to you. And I remember when we first sailed up into like the islands in Indonesia and it was very remote and we ran out of tomatoes. We ran out of eggs. We ran out of all fresh vegetables. And we were eating for the last really a month. We were eating cans. It was an eye-opener for me. We spend most of our time anchored. About 10% is sailing and 90% is at anchor. On average, we sail about 8,000 nautical miles per year. And when we're at anchor, we tend to try and stay out of actual port ports, like places like marinas, where there's a lot of boats and restaurants and bars. It's cool every once in a while, but number one, you spend a lot of money in places like that. And number two, we tend to like being on remote, desolate places. Our plans for the year really depend on the weather. We travel by the wind and the currents of the ocean. And so looking at the seasons ahead of us is incredibly important, both for our safety, but also for our comfort. We've had around 60 people sail on Delos over the last 10 years. It's been a lot and it's been absolutely incredible. Right now, it's only me and Brian and Sierra. Which is awesome, it's perfect. Yeah, it's very, very nice. I think it's safe to say that we've actually never been anywhere that we didn't want to go back to. But there's always something special that you can find about the place or the people. This is our bedroom. It's in the back of the boat, in the stern. For two people, it's pretty perfect. We can even stand up. We have a little desk, which is really nice to sit back here and work a little bit. We have a pretty big bed, I would say. It's not huge, but it's nice and comfy and squishy. If it gets really hot, we have two fans. So this is basically how we kind of stay cool back here. We never really run the AC unless we're in a marina, which is not very often. We also have a separate bathroom, also called the head on the boat, which is kind of weird, but it is. So in here, we have everything you have in a toilet, I think, but just compact. This is where you do your business. And we have an electric motor. So if you press this, it basically fills with salt water from the ocean, and then either pumps it straight out, or we also have a holding tank. So depending on where we are, if we're out in the ocean, it just goes out. And if we're in somewhere where there's a lot of boats and stuff, we keep it in a holding tank. We have pretty deep sinks, which is really nice because I do do some hand washing. So it's really good to hand wash stuff here, and it can also act as a bath for Sierra when she was a little smaller. We kind of have it combined, so it's not a separate shower. So you have the toilet there, and then here you just close this, and you shower in there. Well, this is our closet. It's not very big, but it's pretty perfect for us. And I've actually gone through a lot of our clothes and just got rid of a bunch of stuff and just have the necessities. So this is all Brian's clothes on this side, and all of my clothes on that side. But we do have some smaller cabinets too. Like here, I have my clothes. So to maximize even more storage, things that we don't get to that often is under this bed. But it's very heavy. So under here is all of our kind of storaway stuff, that long-term storage. So we have some extra sheets, some cold-weather stuff, cold-weather clothes, and it's quite a lot of good storage down here. So when we have a lot of people on the boat, it's very nice to work back here too. And then you just pull this little chair out, and you can sit back here and do your computer things, which is very, very nice. This is a very, very good safety feature on Delos. And this door is actually a watertight bulkhead. So if we would get a hole in our house, in the boat, back here, we could close this door, and this whole area back here would be separated from the front of the boat. So this could be filled up with water, and we would still float. So we have a few of these on Delos, and it's crucial if you get a hole in the boat, and so you don't sink basically. We have the forward cabin. You can sleep three people up here if you're very, very good friends. Otherwise, it's good for one person or two people to sleep on one side, and then you kind of have this other area on the side as a little sofa or where you can put your stuff. And right now, because it's only me and Brian on board, we have this as our kind of workroom. We do sewing up here. This is also our diaper drying station right now, because the wind flow in here is awesome, so it dries them really fast. And up here, we also have a second toilet, which is very, very nice to have on board in case one of them fails, which happens quite often, actually. So this is the same as the one in the back, and it works pretty much exactly the same. We earn money by making YouTube videos. Yeah, that's pretty much it. We have a project, and it's called the Delos Project, and it's 100% supported by what we refer to as the Delos tribe, which are the people that watch our videos. And we make some money with things like YouTube ad revenue and affiliate links, but by far, the majority of the support comes from crowdfunding on Patreon, where people that like the videos and get something out of them support them by giving us a few dollars every time we produce a video. It wasn't always like that, though. Like, for the first four years, almost five years of the trip, we were stopping to work, and so we would sail, and then we'd run out of money, and then we would stop to work wherever we happened to be. We'd do random things, like I would do remote software consulting. We'd roll burritos, we'd flip burgers, work in hospitality, whatever it took to continue sailing for another season. How much it costs to live on a boat. I've met people sailing around the world, a family of five spending about $1,000 a month, which is probably at the low end of the budget. Karen and I in Sierra, to live and sail on Delos, we spend about $2,500 a month, and that's including our food, our provisions, fuel for the boat, insurance, visa fees, some things like that. What it's not including is the actual price of the boat. So if you don't have enough money to buy a boat outright, you're gonna have a mortgage or owe money, and then that's gonna add on top. Yeah, Brian spent a lot of time working on the boat. Yeah, it's true. You know, imagine taking your house and shaking it up and putting it into a wet, saltwater, corrosive environment, and then moving it thousands of miles away from the nearest hardware store or anybody who could help you fix anything. And that's a little bit what sailing around the world is like. And so I spend a lot of time maintaining the boat. In fact, I've needed to become an electrician, I've needed to become a plumber, a diesel mechanic, toilet repairman, air conditioning and refrigeration specialist, and everything in between. It's pretty common for me to spend at least a few full days a month just working on keeping the boat in shape. It can be incredibly expensive if you don't do your own work. And so I figure our maintenance budget on Delos is about $700 a month, averaged over the entire year. And if we were not doing the work ourselves, I think you could easily triple that amount, just paying somebody, a technician, to come out and fix things. All right, now we're gonna take a look at the engine room, which is really the heart of Delos. And it lives in this cool little door, this waterproof door in the bottom of our cockpit. So we just open it up like that. And then we have a ladder. We climb down here. And once you get down here, it has everything in it that really runs the boat. So on this side, we have a fuel tank. It's 600 liters of fuel, and that's enough to last us three to four months. This is our engine, so when there's no wind, this is the main diesel engine that we use to propel the boat. This is our generator. So this is an eight kilowatt AC generator, runs off diesel fuel. And when we need to charge the batteries, or we don't have enough solar, or we need to do something that requires a lot of power, we can flip this guy on. This is our hot water heater. So we have hot water showers on the boat, which is actually quite a luxury. I don't know if you can see down here, this is our dive compressor. So we run this off of the generator, and it's what fills our scuba bottles. So we're totally self-sufficient for diving, which is totally cool. We have the desalinator, which turns salt water into fresh drinking water, which allows us to basically stay at sea indefinitely. Without that, we'd have to go into port like every few weeks for water. And battery chargers, electronics, and all sorts of cool stuff. But this is really my office. So having a baby on the boat is absolutely incredible and extremely challenging at the same time. Yeah, if you can imagine, you know, maintaining and sailing a boat is a full-time job, and then having a child is also a full-time job. And so we basically have two full-time jobs. Oh, I think somebody woke up. Morning. So this is where Sierra sleeps. She has a little beach tent as a safe place to sleep in here. And right next to it, we change the diapers, right? In here, above Sierra, we have all our medical stuff. Everything you can think about, antibiotic. If you have a really bad sprain, if you need to sew some wound up, we have pretty much everything. EpiPens. So under here, we have eight 100 amp hour batteries. It's a 24 volt system. So this is, I guess you could call this our back porch, really. We have a nice big area on the deck where we can sort of lounge and relax. Back here, we have some solar panels. We actually have 1400 watts of solar power on Delos, which allows us to power the entire boat, freezers, fridges, all the electronics, everything off of solar and also wind power. So we have two wind generators up here. They each produce 400 watts of power. So when the wind is blowing, those guys are spinning and it's pumping in power. This giant dish right here is our internet. So this is a gimbaled satellite dome and it allows us to get broadband speed internet anywhere we go, which given our line of work is absolutely fantastic. Now let's go check out the foredeck of Delos. So this is Delos's main mast and where the mizzen is 52 feet high. The main mast is 66 feet high. So it's over a six story building. So it's pretty high. This is our main sail. It's on a roller furling. And these are electric motors with gearboxes that actually control how the sail comes out and how the sail rolls out of the mast. That's what's controlled by those buttons in the cockpit. So we never have to leave the cockpit to come up front and reef the sails or put them in or put them out. So it's a super cool system. You really can't be scared of heights when you live on a boat. Otherwise, when you go to the top of the mast, you'll be in trouble. You know, when you're in a house and a storm comes by and the wind and the rain starts, it could be a very cozy experience. On a boat, it can sometimes be a very harrowing experience because, you know, your house is in peril. You know, just the other night we were here and we woke up at midnight because we felt this sudden thud and the wind had shifted just enough to push Delos into shallow water. So instead of floating happily at her anchor, she was now bouncing off the bottom of the ocean, which is a terrible, terrible scenario to be in. So here we are, midnight, middle of the night, wind's blowing, it's raining, and we have to get dressed. We have to go outside and we have to pick up the anchor and we have to move the boat to deeper water. And so that's a challenge. You're always sort of living on guard and on the edge for situations like that. So because we live on a boat, things are a little bit different than a house. In this locker, we have survival supplies for worst case scenarios. So here we have a gigantic manual pump. So if we start taking on water, we start pumping for our lives, literally. Here we have a life raft. So this is a six man life raft. It's auto-inflating. If anything were to happen, we pull the life raft out of the boat, we throw it over, we tie it on, and it has enough supplies to last for, I think, seven days for six people. We have spare water. So we have 40 liters of fresh drinking water in case anything happens to our main water supply. And we also have a ditch kit. And so a ditch kit contains all the supplies that you would want to take with you if you abandon ship. So we have spare VHF radio, we have flashlights, we have food, we have even more water in here, we have fishing gear, we have signal mirrors. If worst case scenario were to come, we'd take all this stuff out and then we would abandon ship with it and it would allow us to hopefully be rescued and survive long enough for somebody to find us. I absolutely love living on a boat. It's extremely special. And I think one of the things I love the most is that you are so connected with the weather and nature. You literally live outside all the time. We've sailed in the tropics for quite a number of years and we're really looking forward to exploring some places that are different for us. So we are gonna sail up to Greenland and up to the Arctic and play around in the ice for a little bit this summer. It feels a little bit terrifying. In fact, when I think about it, it puts like that knot in my stomach. And throughout this trip over the years, every time that we've made a decision that sort of puts that knot in our bellies, it's turned out to be an incredible experience. So we're gonna put a heater on Delos. We're gonna set the boat up for cold weather and we're gonna head up north and see what it's like. Please share this video if you liked it. Also be sure to subscribe to Exploring Alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this. Thanks for watching.