>>TERYSA: There's a lot that we love about the live-aboard lifestyle. What really appeals to me is
the travel, the adventure and the challenge because it is challenging.
I also really love the minimalist nature of our lifestyle and the fact that we are self-sufficient.
The fact that we are connected to the environment in a way that you just aren't when you live in a city.
>>NICK: I love the boat. I think it's cozy. I think it's beautiful. It's comfortable. You know, this is our home.
It's got just about everything we own on board. It's just a very nice lifestyle.
[Music Playing]
>>TERYSA: We've been living on the boat for
5 years now and 4 of those have been actually actively sailing and cruising.
So for the first year,
we were just living in our marina, getting the boat ready to set sail and the 4 years after that,
we have actually been sailing around half of the world.
We have sailed from the UK down the Atlantic coast of Europe.
We crossed the Atlantic Ocean and then we spent 2 years in the Caribbean and the Bahamas,
the east coast of the USA and then last year we
crossed the Atlantic again back to Europe and that's where we are now.
So before we moved onto our boat, we were living in London in our apartment.
I was working as a paramedic and Nick was working as a dentist.
So with my shift work, we didn't actually get a chance to see each other very much.
So when we were together, it was usually on the weekend while we were sailing.
I think that we both felt that life in London was very hectic. It was very fast-paced
and we both I think got caught up in the whole consumerism of
modern day life and we crave something simpler.
>>NICK: It was very, very scary
making that transition from being
in a job with the security of employment
to going actually, you know what? I'm gonna do this while
I'm young enough to enjoy it and it was it was a very brave decision I think we made.
Some may say foolish
but looking back on it now,
we're coming up to 5 years and it's just the best thing we ever did.
[Sounds of Water and Boat Rocking]
My first boat was a little
starter boat 25 feet, worth very little, learnt the ropes on that, then bought a
bigger boat a 32 footer and then when I met Terysa,
we hatched this plan
to buy something we could live on. So this is 40 feet.
So welcome to the inside of Ruby Rose
the galley or kitchen as it would be known if you're on land, is essentially a miniature
version of the kitchen that we had while we were living in London.
There's not a lot that we don't have. So we've got a cook, a grill and oven. We've got fridges.
We've got hot and cold running water.
We've got our coffee machine and we've got all the space that we could need for storage.
The saloon, this is the area that we eat in. It is the area that we watch television.
It has 2 large sofas. They are long enough for us to both relax, lay down on
and sometimes we sleep on these. When we were crossing the Atlantic, we can pull up cloths
and those cloths make cots and those cots allow us if it's really rough to sleep in without getting thrown out of bed.
We've got lots of storage. We've got this is that lovely drinks cabinet.
We have a television over there with DVDs and under these sofas and
to the side of the sofas, we've got lots of storage for books, for
glasses and all our cutlery and crockery.
You will also notice in the middle of the saloon,
we've got this large box. Now this box
does actually turn into an 8 seater table just in case we have a
dinner party. It's rare, but it has happened.
But in addition to that our boat, the keel, the bottom of it lifts up so we can dry the boat out and
this box holds the mechanism for the keel.
So this is part functional but also part of our table. As you can see, it's very, very bright and very airy.
This is tough and bulletproof glass
so that we can have a lot of light coming through the boat.
>>TERYSA: Our first cabin I want to show you is our forecabin.
This is like our guest cabin which is set up for guests but at the moment I have to admit that often
we use it for storage. We have good storage on this boat
but when you're living in a tiny space then sometimes you need somewhere extra to put stuff.
So I'll just show you down here.
[Terysa walking towards another cabin]
This is just some extra storage here
and then we've got a V-berth right here. This is a really comfortable cabin actually.
We've got a big opening hatch which means that it's got really nice airflow and you can't see at the moment
but there's loads of storage
underneath the mattress. Behind the door,
there's a big cupboard.
As you can see, there's shelves on either side and we've got loads of things up on those shelves at the moment.
One of which is Nick's guitar.
Yes, we take Nick's guitars – 2 guitars – everywhere with us. The other shelf has what is called a
Hydrovane and it helps us steer when we're crossing oceans. It's another
steering mechanism for us and our cabin is the master cabin which is
in the aft part of the boat, at the back of the boat, and I am going to show you in there right now.
[Terysa walking towards the master cabin]
I have to admit that when I first got into this boat and I came into this cabin,
this is what sold this boat for me. I just fell in love with it.
So we've got a good sized bed here, big enough for two people, and we've also got loads of storage
underneath the bed and also behind the couches on either side.
You'll notice that above our bed. We've got some fans.
So that's how we keep cool when we are in tropical areas,
and we've also got some opening hatches just up here.
So our bathrooms are not called bathrooms because we're on a boat. They're called heads instead.
We have 2 of them and this is the main one.
This is what we use most of the time and I'll show you in here.
It is compact, but it does have everything that we need.
Obviously, we've got the toilet and the sink and some storage. We don't have a separate shower.
What we have to do is we take the
tap or the faucet and we have to attach up at the top and that creates like a wet room.
So that's our shower.
We have a pump. We can turn the pump on to pump the water out of the bottom of the floor.
We've got a big locker here as well
which we keep all our wet weather gear in. We try to stay in nice warm tropical places
so we don't actually need to go into that locker very often,
but that's where all of our foul weather gear is kept as well.
[Music Playing]
>>NICK: We are almost a completely green boat, so completely self sustainable.
So we have solar panels for generating electricity.
We have a wind generator for generating electricity and we have a hydrogenerator
which we tow behind the boat, which also generates electricity.
So we are completely powered. We don't have air conditioning on board.
We don't have the power for that and all the space for an air conditioning unit and living in the Caribbean,
there is always enough breeze. Where we are in marinas, we obviously have electricity. To generate water,
we have a water maker
that produces enough water for us to live quite happily.
We have a black water holding tank, which we then pump out, when we're 12 miles offshore.
We don't have a greywater tank. Again. it's very difficult to find the space for one.
[Music Playing]
So how I made the transition? We planned
probably for approximately 3 years before we moved onto the boat.
We bought the boat and
we had a plan. It took us 3 years to get out.
>>TERYSA: There are 2
parts to our transition. One was wrapping up our life in London and the other part
was getting the boat ready to set sail.
So they were both happening kind of simultaneously.
We had a three-bedroom apartment. We basically sold everything on eBay or got rid of everything.
We have a storage unit of things that are of personal value, but it was a huge, huge undertaking
getting rid of all of our stuff.
The other part was
that Nick had to sell his business and that took a long time and it was very stressful.
For me, it was just a fairly straightforward process of resigning from my job.
So when we finally had all of that wrapped up
then we moved up to the boat and
then we had to get the boat ready
for the type of sailing and cruising that we wanted to do
and that was a long process as well.
That took us about a year.
>>NICK: Another question we get asked a lot is how do we afford this lifestyle?
What do we do to keep us going and sailing around the world?
Initially, when we when we stopped work, we rented out our apartment.
So we have an apartment in London and we rent that apartment out and we live on the rent.
Over the last couple of years, we started our YouTube channel and the YouTube channel has really taken off.
So between YouTube and Patreon we make an income from that as well.
So that's the strands of our income.
[Music Playing]
>>TERYSA: To be on a boat in the middle of the ocean
with absolutely nothing around you,
no land for sometimes thousands of miles is an experience unlike any other.
It really is quite mind-blowing and it can feel quite daunting and at times, it just hits you how
ridiculous the situation is that you're just on a
relatively small boat in the middle of literally nowhere as isolated as you could probably get and
it's just you and the boat and the ocean and
this whole world underneath you that you can't see or even imagine.
It's a relatively stressful situation to be in anyway,
even when things are all going well because you know that there's potential for things to go wrong.
So you're constantly doing risk assessments.
You're constantly aware that there is a danger even though you do all you can to minimize that danger.
But at the end of the day, it is a huge achievement, I think, to
cross an ocean on your own boat
and it's an achievement that we've been lucky enough to do twice so far and it's something that
you're always glad when it's over. But as soon as it's over and you've recovered,
you're kind of looking forward to the next time. [Laughter]
>>NICK: My love of the sea is
formed from this. The fact that you have to respect it,
the fact that it gives so much but asks
so much from you as well.
A lot of people ask this what do we do at night? Do we stop sailing at night?
Yes, we generally stop sailing at night
if we're not on long passages.
Otherwise, we have to stay up and keep watch. But when we moor the boat,
it depends on the region we are in.
In Europe, so far the Mediterranean it's been a lot of marinas because
there aren't many places to anchor.
In the Caribbean, it was anchoring almost exclusively for 2 years.
We tend to avoid mooring buoys unless we're in very, very crowded anchorages.
But it just depends on the area we are in.
>>TERYSA: The food situation on the boat is pretty similar to
living on land really except
because we aren't always near supermarkets.
In fact often, especially in the Caribbean
we are nowhere near supermarkets sometimes for months at a time.
We have to be very careful about when we provision,
what we're buying, and making sure that we're planning ahead.
The other thing is that when we do provision, we often have to take several hours to do that.
So when you're living on land,
usually you just jump in the car, you drive to a supermarket and it's all done within an hour or so.
Living on a boat,
a) our form of transportation is usually just our legs.
Also, the supermarkets are generally a reasonable walk away
and then we have to carry everything ourselves back to the boat.
So we can't buy as much at any one time.
How we provision really depends on where we are and the way that we're sailing
when we're preparing for an ocean crossing for example.
The longest crossing we've done has been 3 weeks.
So we had to have 3 weeks worth of food on board at that time.
We were able to catch fish on
passage which helped a little bit but we had to assume that we weren't going to be able to do that.
And that was a bit of a challenge, especially with fresh food.
So this is our cockpit area and this is where
we spend almost all of our time,
especially when we're at anchor. We love just lounging around and relaxing in the cockpit.
But also when we're underway, we're obviously almost always in the cockpit.
So it's very comfortable area and it's a very safe area.
So I'll just show you a few of the features.
We have 2 helming positions
and this is the main one that we use.
We use this because it's got most of our controls here.
So as you can see, I've got things like
the compass. I've got controls for the keel, for the windlass
which is what helps us drop our anchor into the water, for our bow thruster which allows us to
move our bow from side to side and our ignition for our engine.
So we've got quite a lot of stuff going on right here.
If I take you to the other helming position.
This is where we have our VHF radio and this is how we communicate with nearby
boats when we are sailing.
We've also got a chart plotter which is obviously off right now because we are all tied up
but generally speaking this is on especially
when we're underway and we use this to look at our charts, our electronic charts, as well as
to see the boats around us
and we also have radar so that shows up on here as well.
We have quite a lot of safety equipment on the back of our boat here
We've some Man Overboard equipment as well as our life raft.
Over on this side, we have some more fun items:
we have our barbecue and our Eski as well as our outboard engine which we attached to our dinghy and
that's how we get around when we are at anchor.
We have 4 winches.
One on either side here and 2 just behind me.
Most of our lines come back to these 2 winches and this is how we control both of the sails and
this is really great because we've set up our boat to control everything from the cockpit
so we don't ever need to go forward
which means it is a much safer setup.
So in rough seas or rough weather we can just stay in the safety of cockpit.
We can tie ourselves onto the railing here or we've got these tie off points here
and we don't ever need to leave but we can manage the sails from here.
>>NICK: Every boat should have a navigation station and/or a chart table.
We keep all our charts in this table here.
In addition to this, we've got some modern-day twists on traditional navigation.
We've got both our radios here.
So we've got our regular radio, which is our VHF radio for talking to people
within about a 40 mile range.
We've also got a high frequency radio so we can talk to people using what's called an
SSB, a single sideband radio, anywhere on the planet.
You can get up to and including 3-4,000 miles range.
So it also has our satellite phone
and other ways of communicating if we're trying to get weather conditions at sea.
Moving back a little bit, there's a control panel here
and that is to do with our electricity, controlling how much water we have,
controlling how much electricity we're using whether it's the solar panels
or whether it's our wind generator because as you can imagine
if you are living off-grid as we do
you have to be really careful about your usage of water. How much tank space we've got?
How much electricity we're using? Whether the sun's out? Whether it's windy?
and so we can monitor quite carefully
and quite accurately how much water and electricity we are using.
So the challenges of the sailing lifestyle.
I think you do have to appreciate from day one, from the get-go, whether you've got a new boat or an old boat,
you will be repairing things every day. Everything needs maintenance and that maintenance is a lot more
frequent and extensive than a house.
That's the first thing.
The challenges really are not getting burnout. That was the biggest challenge for us.
You do need at some point to put some roots down, spend a month in a place.
And so those I think are the biggest challenges. I haven't found anything else to be a challenge.
We haven't struggled with WiFi at all. Local SIM cards and a WiFi booster have dealt with all that.
Meeting friends and then having to leave friends is also difficult.
But that's just the sailing life and you have to accept that.
>>TERYSA: Another challenge is that we are so connected to the environment
which in a way is part of what we love about this lifestyle
so much but the flip side of that is that we are completely at the mercy of the weather. And so
our plans really are dictated by the weather,
not just seasonal weather i.e. prevailing winds for that time of year
but more localized weather as well
and we can have the
intention of being at a certain place, on a certain date.
But the reality is that we never quite know what we're going to be doing on any given day.
Because we don't know what the weather's gonna be like. More than once,
we have been woken up in the middle of the night because the weather has changed
and it can be really challenging.
You might be in an anchorage that was perfectly safe in the evening and then by two o'clock in the morning,
it's become unsafe and you have to move in the middle of the night.
So that's another challenge as well is you have to be constantly aware of the weather conditions,
of your environment and change your plans to suit those.
[Music Playing]
The other thing about living on a boat is that I think you really do have to push yourself all the time.
The entire experience is a challenge for reasons that we've already talked about,
but you also are constantly learning new skills.
Nick has had to learn how to be an electrician, a plumber, a carpenter.
I have had to become a logistician,
a planner, organizer and navigator;
in addition to being sailors.
You have to be a little bit of everything when you're living on a boat
because you don't have any other experts to turn to.
You are the only people who can solve a particular problem on a certain day,
and it's a constant learning curve.
We are learning every day.
Every year, we're getting better and better and we're getting more and more experience
but there is always going to be so much more to learn.
>>NICK: I look back on what we've done over the last 4 years
and it has been the best 4 years of my life, without fail. Being able to take all
that you hold as possessions, and your entire house with you and continually change the view,
experiencing different cultures and living those cultures.
Experiencing life in a way that we would never have experienced it if we had
done it any other way. There have been downs, of course, there have been downs. But overall
looking back, it's just been bloody awesome, like amazing. We have achieved so much and we are so much happier now.
[Music Playing]
>>MAT: Be sure to subscribe to Exploring Alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this.
You can also follow Nick and Terysa on their YouTube channel Sailing Yacht Ruby Rose.
Thanks for watching.