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 dello setup that
once we have 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 onboard 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 ten years we've sailed Dulles $83,000 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 Karen Chapman and I am born and raised in
Sweden my name is Brian Chapman and I was raised in Flagstaff Arizona this is
a little Sierra Abbott Troutman 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 I sold everything I owned I sold my
house I bought a sailboat named Ellis 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 Wow yeah I never left I had never sailed
before and it was absolutely life-changing I fell in love with it
straightaway and of course fell in love with Brian
sue
welcome to our home Dulles she is a 53-foot sloop rig ketch which
means that she has two masts and 1/4 day and right now we're in the cockpit of
Dulles 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 short-handed and when the weather gets bad or you're
sailing at nighttime you don't want to 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 welcoming to our kitchen this is really a one-man kitchen or a 1/1 Lane
kitchen he's not really big enough for two people and it's kind of narrow which
makes it really good whoever 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 fine across the whole boat
we have everything that you'd find in a normal kitchen I would say we have you
know it's 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
dinner on the floor 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 it's nonstop by three this is
our fridge yeah for being a bowl 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 he's very nice when it has a door and you can have everything
like organized in there well not a thing that I'm extremely happy about
it's our washing machine it's just a 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 electronic 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 or 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
it 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 isn't EPIRBs a
stands for emergency position indicating radio beacon so for 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 - is 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 pickup 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 you 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 dolls is that we have so much food storage this is all
food and stuff and if you here inside the cell phone 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 freezes like this because if we
catch 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 Plenty area as she's getting
bigger it's been a bit challenging with her starting to climb over things and
stuff so we have sown a little they don't like to call it caged 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 yeah so if you lift
this up this canned food milks all the floors really lifts up and it's deep
builder so all the canned foods we name 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 a cockroach's right
now which is very nice one of the things that I had never thought about when I
first moved on to Delos 9 years ago was when you go off grid and you run out of
food that's it there's no more getting more oh 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, month we were eating cans, it was a eye opener for me.
her for me we spent most of our time anchored about 10% is sailing and 90% is
a tanker 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 like 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
you 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 a
sixty people fail on bellos over the last ten years it's been a lot and it's
been absolutely incredible right now it's only me and Bryan 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 you
there's always something special that you can find about the place of the
people
this is our bedroom in the back of the boat in the stern the 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
he's not huge but it's nice and comfy and cushy 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 a/c unless or 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 this 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 soft 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 up and if we're in
somewhere where is 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 which II was a little smaller we kind of have a combined so it's not a
separate shower so you had the toilet there and then here you use clothespins
baby 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 to like here I have my clothes so to
maximize even more storage things that we don't get to like that often is under
this bed so under here is all of our kind of store away stuff that long
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 I'm gonna have
a lot of people on the boat it's very nice to work back here too and then you
pull this little chair out you can sit back here and do your computer things
which is not 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 that's 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 drives 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 a 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 yeah 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 sale and then we'd run out of money and then we would stop to work
wherever we happen to be we 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 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 and Sierra to live and sail on Delos we spend about $2,500 a month
and that's including like 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 too you know
imagine taking your house and shaking it up and put 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 spent a lot
of time maintaining the boat in fact I've needed to become an electrician
I've needed to become a plumber diesel mechanic toilet repairman air
conditioning and refrigeration specialists 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 book 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 want to put it up like that and then we have a
ladder when you 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
8 kilowatt AC generator runs off diesel fuel and when we need to charge the
batteries or if you 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 saltwater 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 it's a this is 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 well I think somebody
Wow so this is where Ciara sleeps she has a little beach tent as a safe place
to sleep in here and right next to it we changed 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
so 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 gimballed 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 floor deck of Delos so this is
Delos mainmast and where the mizzen is 52 feet
high the main mast is 66 feet high sits over a six story building so it's pretty
high this is our mainsail 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
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 ear houses 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 winds blowin 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 that's 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 Otto 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 litres 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 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 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 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 pan 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