Brady Trautman: 10 Years Sailing 83,000 Nautical Miles

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 327 with Brady Trautman.

Brady Trautman: A lot of times, in countries like India or the Andaman Islands, the internet was so slow that it was faster for us to put an episode on a thumb drive, ship it, mail it to my friend in Florida, and he would upload the episodes for us and release them. And then ours would still be uploading, like, six days later. I'm Brady from SV Delos, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Meeting Brady Trautman and the SV Delos Story

Tom Rowland: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show today. I have a great guest. Brady Trautman and his brother first bought this 53-foot sloop-rigged sailboat, and they decided that they were gonna go for about eighteen months. Well, fast forward ten years, they've gone 83,000 miles. That's three times around the equator. They've been to six of seven continents and seen some incredible things. And along the way, they figured out how to do this in a way that they can sustain themselves and live in this really cool alternate lifestyle, which is just to live on this sailboat. It's really cool.

Tom Rowland: If you are a fan of their YouTube channel, you will know them as SV Delos. SV means sailing vessel, and Delos is the name of the boat. They have, I don't know, a ton of YouTube followers, and they have been making these videos for almost ten years. So you can check out their YouTube channel, and I think you're gonna want to after you hear this interview with my friend, Brady Trautman. Brady, what's going on, man? How are you?

Brady Trautman: I'm doing really good, man. Just kinda waking up out here in Lake Tahoe.

Tom Rowland: Lake Tahoe, that's a long way from where your boat is right now.

Brady Trautman: It is, man. Yeah. We found our stuff out here during the whole weird COVID stuff, and it's been kind of nice to quarantine up in the mountains. It's just beautiful up here.

Tom Rowland: So I've been doing my homework. I've been watching a bunch of videos. I don't really know how I didn't come across your story earlier because, man, you guys have been doing this for a long time. You have a ton of YouTube videos. So the SV Delos is the name of the boat, right?

Brady Trautman: Yep. The name of the boat is Delos. Exactly.

Tom Rowland: And SV stands for sailing vessel. And then, I love the story. It started out as kind of a break from the normal life, or maybe a recharge or something. And here we are, what, ten years later? Kinda take me through how this all happened for you and your brother.

Growing Up, Scuba Diving, and Buying Delos

Brady Trautman: For sure. So I kinda grew up in Arizona, in Flagstaff, and I was a little bit away from the ocean, obviously. Then when I was about nine years old — and my brother that I went sailing with is ten years older than me, so he was 19 — my parents got divorced. So I moved with my mom to Florida, and he went off to college in Seattle, Washington. And for the next five or ten years, we kind of saw each other every once in a while, but only on Christmas and vacations and stuff. But during that time, we both got into sailing in different aspects. I was down in Florida going to college, and I was teaching scuba diving down in the Florida Keys and ended up getting into sailing down there. And he was up in Seattle getting into sailing at the same time.

Tom Rowland: Where were you teaching scuba diving?

Brady Trautman: It's called the Florida High Adventure Sea Base.

Tom Rowland: Oh, yeah.

Brady Trautman: It's in Islamorada.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. That's right in front of the road that my partner lives on, or lived on for a while. He's moved on now. But that's great. Is that Boy Scouts, or what is that?

Brady Trautman: It is. Yeah.

Tom Rowland: That's a great program. So you worked there for how long?

Brady Trautman: I was there for, like, two years. It was only during the summers when I was going to college. So I think I did it, like, three summers in a row. It was so much fun, man. It was the best job in the world. I literally got paid to take kids out scuba diving and teach them to dive, and they took me all the way through my captain's licenses and dive instructor and everything. So it was a really good program to kind of get my foot in the door in sailing and diving and all that kind of stuff.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome, man. We drive past that, and it looks like the best summer camp you could ever have. There's another Boy Scout camp a little further down the Keys, kind of as you go towards Spanish Harbor. There's another Boy Scout property. I don't know what they do there, but it's just off to the left.

Brady Trautman: It's pretty similar. Most of them do sailing, camping, and scuba diving, and yep, there's a whole other base down there in the Keys.

Tom Rowland: Nice. Okay. That's cool. It's like a small world when it's actually on your front doorstep.

Brady Trautman: I know, right?

Tom Rowland: You talk to someone, and you're like, oh, really? Where's that? Oh, wow. That's next door.

Brady Trautman: Yeah. It was so much fun working down there. And like I said, just taking the kids out and diving, that really got me into sailing because we would go sailing in our spare time or take the boats out. And it just got me passionate about it. I never knew people that live on boats. It's just one of those things where you're like, what? People live on boats full time? And it just so happened my brother was going through the same kind of experience up in Seattle. He had his own company doing web design and software development and stuff, and he was going through the same thing. Him and his partner were like, how do people live on boats and travel the world by boat? And eventually him and his partner bought Delos. His ex bought Delos, and we were like, we're gonna sail to Australia, and we'll just start with that. And then I was still in college at the time, and my brother asked me to join for a trip from Mexico to French Polynesia. It was supposed to be, like, three, four weeks at sea, and then after that I was literally gonna fly back and go to college. And I mean, I couldn't turn it down, right? Once I started diving, all these magazines I saw were French Polynesia, the Tuamotus, all these places for diving and fishing, and all of a sudden I could just sail there on my own boat, which was just insane to think about.

Tom Rowland: But then you're expected to get there and get on an airplane and leave, like, after you spent three weeks trying to get there? Who thought that was gonna happen?

Brady Trautman: I don't know. I don't know if any of us thought that was gonna happen. I literally took out all my student loans before that trip. I signed up for all my classes, took out student loans, and then dropped my classes because I needed the cash to actually pay for the trip and get across the ocean. And once we got to Tahiti, it was like, wow, this is just getting started. And I felt like for once I was actually doing something that was super meaningful. When I was in college, it was just kind of treading water and doing what I was supposed to be doing to get by because society told me to do it, or whatever it was. And all of a sudden I felt like I was in the right place and just wanted to be there. So I definitely didn't fly out.

Reconnecting With His Brother and Life Aboard

Tom Rowland: And so at the same time, are you having a reunion with your brother and getting to know him differently as grown people?

Brady Trautman: Yeah, definitely. When we left, I was twenty-one and he was 31. So we were always super close, but living on board together, we got along so well. We still get along very well, and we have all the same interests — adventure and travel with diving and sailing. So it was great to not only share something like that with a good friend, but also a brother. So we got even closer over that trip.

Tom Rowland: That's super cool. Well, you're gonna get pretty close on a 53-foot boat in three weeks. Now, in the Florida Keys, you have tons of people that live on boats, but I don't know how many of them are moving. They come in, and I'm sure there's tons of people like yourself that come in, resupply, hang out for a little bit, and then take off and go somewhere else. But we have these anchorages of boats right out off Key West, and it's the same boats there all the time. Key West is a very expensive place. So that is a legitimate alternate to getting an apartment or a house or whatever. If it's too expensive, people will buy a boat or even rent a boat and live there. But you guys — from what I did in my homework — 83,000 miles at the time of the video that I watched, you sailed 83,000 miles in this boat, which it said was something like three times around the equator. Is that still accurate today, or is it more?

Brady Trautman: It is. It's more than that now. It's probably closer to 90-something now. Like I said, we've gone around the world enough. The miles cover the equator three times, like you just said, but we go north and south a lot. That's why it's so crazy, because we're always chasing the seasons. And like you said, the people that live in the Keys and in Florida and live on boats and use them as apartments, it's definitely the same. But with us, the beauty of it is we can move our home with us. Wherever we go, we're technically home still. But you're in some random country. So it's by far the best way to live and travel, for sure, because you have so much freedom.

Living Off the Grid: Power, Water, and Provisions

Tom Rowland: The thing that I was checking out was like a little documentary on the boat and everything. It was talking about how long you could stay off the grid, which I found incredibly interesting because that is, like, my secret fantasy — to live off the grid, maybe forever. It's funny for somebody that makes their living on the internet and on television that you would wanna not be there. So it went through the way that your boat's set up. How long can you stay completely self-sufficient?

Brady Trautman: Oh, man. Minimum, probably three or four months. And really, the other side of it is if you have wind and sun, we're really just dependent on food at that point. If you catch your own food, you could be out forever, really.

Tom Rowland: Right. So you've got wind-generated power, solar-generated power that can recharge all of your batteries. And then you've got a water tank plus desalination. Like, what else would you need? Oh, I saw that you could fill all your own scuba tanks, which is sweet. Because now you can dive as much as you want, and that's how you're gonna get your food, probably. And then, what else? What's the limitation there? Like, the staples? Are you gonna run out of just food?

Brady Trautman: It's really the fresh stuff that starts to get you. The fresh provisions last for maybe three weeks, four weeks, depending on where you are, what you can get, and what climate you're in. Once that's out, we have two pretty big freezers on board so we can pack it full of stuff. We catch fish. And then we have tons of storage where we can store canned food and dried food and stuff like that. So really, the limitation comes if you need to run the generator on board to fill dive tanks or make water. Eventually you'll run out of diesel. But if you run out of diesel, you can catch rainwater, or you don't need to dive — you can make it work at the end of the day. It just gets a little bit harder when you run out of fresh food.

Ocean Crossings and Weather Planning

Tom Rowland: So on a crossing, what would be the longest crossing that you've done where you would have to be completely self-sufficient just to get from point A to point B?

Brady Trautman: That first crossing that we did from Mexico to the Marquesas in French Polynesia was tied for pretty much the two longest crossings, and that was twenty-one days. Full open ocean, twenty-one days just out there.

Tom Rowland: Wow. And that's the one that you chose first? Would you choose a different one now after you have a little bit more experience? Was that being naive and inexperienced, that you're just like, let's do the biggest one first?

Brady Trautman: What surprised me the most, I guess, is once you're out in the ocean after the first four or five days, it all just blends together. Everything just melts away, and days go by like minutes is what it feels like. So whether it's five days or twenty days, to me it just kind of all — once the internet goes away and you get sick of watching movies, then you're just reading, you get sick of reading, then eventually you find yourself staring at the ocean for four or five hours at a time during your watch, and it just all blends together. And what I didn't realize really is, once you get that far offshore, it's not like the ocean changes. I don't know if people have this idea in their head — I even had it — of being like, oh, out in the middle of the Pacific, it must be gnarly. Like, it must be crazy waves and crazy seas. And really, as long as you stay away from the storms and you plan accordingly to the weather that's coming in, it's super nice. It's really, really calming.

Tom Rowland: So how do you do that? That seems to be the biggest factor — the weather, in my opinion. You are in a 53-foot boat, which sounds kinda big until you have a hurricane or a big storm. Then all of a sudden that boat can feel very small. How are you planning your trips and getting weather information and changing your course? Is that necessary, or do you just buckle down?

Brady Trautman: So, what we talked about earlier about going north and south a lot — we're always staying in the hemisphere that doesn't have a hurricane season at that point. So we're always crossing the equator right when the seasons change, which hopefully keeps us away from any big storms like hurricanes. Of course, there's always gonna be these gnarly low-pressure systems that come out of nowhere and kind of surprise you, but we use a service called PredictWind. And they do really, really good for offshore passage-making and big ocean weather. So we're able to download through satellite internet — there's a company called Viasat that's kind of hooked us up with this really cool satellite internet — we can download these GRIB files and big sets of data to show where the low pressures are, where the storms are. And really, that's accurate to, like, four or five days out usually.

Tom Rowland: Wow.

Brady Trautman: So if you can see something coming five days away, you can adjust course and hopefully get out of the way in enough time.

Weathering the Worst Storm in the Indian Ocean

Tom Rowland: Have you not gotten out of the way in this ten-year span?

Brady Trautman: Yeah, dude. There's been a few pretty bad situations.

Tom Rowland: What's the worst?

Brady Trautman: The worst for me sticks out when we were crossing the Indian Ocean. We were on our way from Thailand to Madagascar. And the Indian Ocean is pretty bare. There's a few random atolls out there, but not much. Actually, the video you watched — the best fishing of our lives — was filmed during that crossing right before we hit this gnarly storm.

Tom Rowland: Found some nice wahoo.

Brady Trautman: I know, right? That was great. We had seven people on the boat. We ate for, like, five weeks off those fish.

Tom Rowland: Wow. That's awesome.

Brady Trautman: There was so much fish. But we were sailing along towards Madagascar, and there was this big low-pressure system forming in the Southern Indian Ocean that started coming north. And we saw it coming for three or four days, but we only had a limited amount of choices to get out of the way or power through it. If we would have turned north to get out of the way, it would have taken us straight to Somalia, which we didn't wanna do back in 2013, 2014.

Tom Rowland: Pirates.

Brady Trautman: We couldn't really turn south because of the wind angle. We couldn't go that far into the wind. We could have hove to, which is basically just stopping the boat in the middle of the ocean — you work the sails out where you put the brakes on and you just kinda float around. But we didn't feel that that would have been a good choice either, so we decided just to weather the storm and go straight through it. And so the sea-level pressure came up from underneath us, and we got hit right after the sunset. It hit us at, like, eight, nine PM, and the winds topped fifty, sixty knots easy, and big swells — swells that were 30 foot, 40 foot maybe — kind of knocking the boat over from side to side. And it was a rough night. It was really rad. There was seven of us on board, and everybody locked themselves down below in the companionway because the cockpit was filled with water, so we didn't want water to go in the boat. So we locked that up, and me and my brother just literally sat in the cockpit, strapped in life vests, and clipped in as well. And we were just taking thirty-minute shifts steering, because it was so hard. You're just hand-steering, and, like, pitch black, and this crazy wave would come and knock you over, and you'd get so tired that after thirty minutes you'd switch. You'd lay down on the cockpit floor and try and sleep for thirty minutes and then switch. We did that for about twelve hours, I'd say, before the sun came up. And of course, when the sun comes up, it feels like things calm down and we were able to relax a little bit. And then it went away. The storm blew over us, and in twenty-four hours it was gone. We had blue skies, and we made it right around the corner of Madagascar. And it was like, holy cow.

Tom Rowland: And everything made it? Like, you didn't break anything?

Brady Trautman: Luckily, Delos is a super strong boat. She's very ocean-capable, and she proved herself during that storm specifically, where we were like, we're gonna break before the boat breaks. And it was kind of a good feeling to put all your trust in it.

Choosing the Right Bluewater Boat

Tom Rowland: That's cool because — I mean, I don't know a ton about your story except what I just read in the last day or so, but at least the story that I read kind of made it sound like there wasn't a lot of sailing experience before you bought this boat. You said that you had some and your brother had some. So you go to buy this boat. Did you kinda get lucky that you got the right boat, or did you know in some way that this is what you were looking for? This is the kind of boat that you needed? Or did it kinda happen that way?

Brady Trautman: There was a ton of research involved. There was a list that a lot of the sailing magazines put out, like the top 10 bluewater cruising boats. And this boat, the brand, is an Amel. It's a French boat. And it was always at the top of the list, and then you go to the boat shows and everyone just knows it — it has a great reputation in the sailing community. So it wasn't really by coincidence. Brian really looked at that boat and was like, that's the boat that we wanna take, that's really ocean-capable. And it's definitely proved to be that boat, for sure.

From Eighteen Months to a Way of Life

Tom Rowland: That's cool. So at what point does it go from, this is gonna be something that you're gonna do for a little while, to, man, I think we could do this for a lot longer? Where does that happen?

Brady Trautman: Well, let's see. We left Mexico in 2010, and we got to New Zealand in November 2010. So from March till November was kind of our first big season. And we were completely in love with it. We were like, we'll figure out a way. At that point, we could have all flown home and gone back to work and saved more money, but we stayed in New Zealand, and I got a job managing a Mexican restaurant. My brother did some remote IT work and also did day work, like engineer work for bigger superyachts and stuff. And we just tried to save as much as we could during the off-season there before we started sailing again. And there was a weird moment where, once we did it that first season and we found jobs and made it work, we were like, well, we can just do this forever, because if we can do it here, we'll find jobs in Australia, we'll find jobs wherever we are, and worst-case scenario, we'll park the boat, fly back home, work, and then come back and continue on. So I think after that first season, it was definitely — we never really intended to go around the world. It was just kind of, let's just keep going to what seems cool. And because all the weather moves west, we just kind of naturally kept going west.

Starting the YouTube Channel and Finding an Audience

Brady Trautman: And then, when the filming came into the whole picture — our family and friends were like, what the hell are you guys doing out there? They just didn't get it. We wrote tons of blogs. We wrote over, like, 400 blogs during that period and took a lot of pictures, but we never really filmed anything until our family and friends were like, I still don't get it. I bought a little camera and started filming and putting these little episodes together and putting them on YouTube for our family and friends to watch. And then out of nowhere, other people just started watching.

Tom Rowland: And that's back in 2010?

Brady Trautman: There's a few videos up there from 2010. That's pretty early. Just slideshows with, like, text and stuff. And then the story ones really started, I'd say, like, 2012 maybe.

Tom Rowland: Still early, man. A couple —

Brady Trautman: Still really early in the game. And I think that's why we organically were able to be successful, because we started so early. People could say now, oh, Brady, I wanna buy a boat, start a YouTube channel and make money. And I'm just like, do it because you love it. Don't do it because you wanna make money from it, because it's just saturated now. And of course, it's possible — it's all possible. It's just, the reason we were successful, I think, is mainly because we were passionate about what we're doing, and we didn't think it would lead to money. We just kinda loved doing it and loved sharing. I remember the first time we got a check from YouTube, they sent us, like, a $30 check or something for ad revenue. We were like, what the hell is this? YouTube's gonna send us money for putting videos up? Do they put ads on them? And it was like this whole revelation that led to making more videos, and then Patreon started, and it kinda snowballed from there.

Tom Rowland: I think it's so cool. I've had all kinds of people on this podcast, including a girl I just love talking to because her story is very similar to yours — of just wanting to do something. What she wanted to do was hike, and she did the Appalachian Trail, and then the Pacific Crest Trail, and then the Continental Divide Trail. And she keeps doing these big hiking trips where she's gone, like you guys, for a tremendous amount of time. There's no working going on. But this YouTube opportunity and Patreon has opened up the opportunity to do what you love to do because you love to do it, and other people love watching, and they're supporting it. I think it's so cool. Basically the internet has done that. It's allowed people to see what it is that you're doing. Maybe they'll never do it themselves. Maybe they're dreaming that they can one day do it, or maybe they're planning it. But they give you guys a couple bucks every time you do a video, and it goes a long way to helping. Have you ever figured out what it costs you to do one of these trips, like per month?

Brady Trautman: Yeah. Well, it's kinda different for what kind of boat you're on — all kinds of different variables. Because the boat's a nice boat, we had pretty much a house mortgage on it. So we had a mortgage, boat insurance, but the actual cost of living, not just running the boat, is not very much, man. It's, like, $125 per person per day is what we figured out. That was including food and fuel and a little bit of maintenance here and there. None of the big-ticket maintenance items, like replacing rigging and sails, but that covered — if somebody wanted to come out to the boat, it covered their cost, basically. So then you factor in, of course, the other big cost of the boat itself and insurance and all that stuff. But people do it on boats — if they save up 40 or $50,000 and buy a boat and go sail around the world, they live off, you know, a hundred a month. And you could do it any way. You can either go to these expensive marinas, or you could be anchored in the middle of nowhere.

Going All In With Patreon

Tom Rowland: It's super cool, though — to be able to do it, and then to see, like, that moment that you described of getting the job, making a little bit of money, and realizing, man, we could just do this forever. Was there, like, a time when you and your brother were like, yes, let's do this and just keep going? Or was it a little bit stair-step? Was there ever that one moment where you're just like, yeah, we're never going back?

Brady Trautman: Yeah, there was. Actually, it was right after we started Patreon. We already had a pretty good following on YouTube — that was back in, like I said, 2013 or '14, and I think we had, like, 30,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is huge. We were like, wow, there's that many people that wanna watch. And when we started Patreon, it kind of right away was, like, 4 or $500 per episode we put out, and we were doing, like, two episodes a month. And we're like, well, this is definitely a viable option to keep going. So at that point, yeah, we were like, we're all in. Let's just do this. Let's not think about leaving the boat to go make money — because for a while there, I would leave the boat, go work on superyachts and crew on big boats, and then come back, save a bunch of money, and come back to the boat and continue sailing. But at that point, we made a decision to just go all in and work our ass off, and we made the pledge to release an episode every Friday.

Tom Rowland: Wow.

Brady Trautman: Yeah. And that was huge.

Finding Internet in the Middle of Nowhere

Tom Rowland: So it's kind of an interesting situation again that you are off the grid, and you're making your living on the internet, basically. So were you set up for that? When you made this decision that we're gonna do this every week, we're gonna release a video, you gotta have some pretty reliable internet. Did you already have that, or did you have to make the investment to get set up to where you could do that?

Brady Trautman: No. We had nothing back then. That's part of it — half the adventure we filmed was trying to find internet to upload videos. A lot of times, in countries like India or the Andaman Islands, the internet was so slow that it was faster for us to put an episode on a thumb drive, ship it, mail it to my friend in Florida, and he would upload the episodes for us and release them. And then ours would still be uploading, like, six days later.

Tom Rowland: Wow. But you're able to edit and everything right on the boat, without having to go to land, and process all that stuff yourself, and then somehow get to a place where you can ship it?

Brady Trautman: Yep, exactly. That was the incredible moment too — when you realize all you need is a couple of really good cameras and a laptop, then you can really just create each episode out of the middle of nowhere.

Leveling Up the Production Quality

Tom Rowland: And then it seems as though your production quality has gone up. I saw drones, GoPros. You've got all kinds of stuff going on now. Do you just continue to step it up a little bit, or has there been, like, a big step one time when you get Patreon or when you get more followers? Did you have a big step in production at one point?

Brady Trautman: Yeah. I'd say when drones came into the picture and they became readily available, that was a huge jump for us for, like, the cinematic quality. And we were never into the vlogging where you do, like, a ten- to twelve-minute episode. For us — I mean, I love watching vlogs like that, but for us it just felt like we wanted to create, like, a story, and make it twenty minutes or more is what we always would shoot for. And maybe that's not the best thing for YouTube for all the analytics and algorithms and stuff, but it is what it is. That's what we really were passionate about. So once we got, like, a Panasonic GH5 and the drone and we started doing slow-mo stuff and more cinematic stuff, that really changed our perspective. And at that point, it made us stand out from a lot of the other channels doing the sailing vlogs as well. I think we're constantly trying to evolve and get new camera gear and learn new camera gear, because we really do enjoy the filming side and creating the story aspect of the whole YouTube game.

Tom Rowland: So does anybody have any television background, or are you just kinda doing this on the fly? Because you put it together kinda like a TV show. Like, on this episode, this is what's gonna happen, then you tease the next episode. It's really more of a television format than a vlog format like you were describing. Does anybody have any background in TV?

Brady Trautman: No. We just were like, man, there should be a reality show about a bunch of people sailing around the world. And we just kind of came up with our own little formula and kept going for it.

Tom Rowland: Well, your formula obviously works and people really like it. If a television network got a hold of it, they would want to —

Brady Trautman: Dramatize it.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. I mean, come on. It's never gonna stay the way that yours is. Yours is pretty pure, right? Like, yeah, we're just kinda having fun. Look, we're gonna go scuba diving. Now that would never fly on regular TV.

Brady Trautman: We've been approached quite a few times by networks wanting to do a pilot, and we've let a few people do a pilot, and it's just like, what is this? It's so cringey, and you lose so much of your creativity when you go that route. And then what are you doing it for at the end of the day? If you're not doing it for yourself and you're not passionate about it anymore, it's not fun. You sold out or something.

Crew, Interns, and Bringing Patrons Aboard

Tom Rowland: Well, along the way, you've had other people come on the boat, and it sounded like even interns — people that can help you produce these videos. What are all the other people coming on the boat for? In the one I saw, it said you've had, like, 60 different people come on the boat, and some of them were described as interns. So did you just, like, reach out to your Patreon audience and your YouTube audience and say, hey, if anybody wants to experience this, you can do it?

Brady Trautman: Yeah, that's a huge one. We started out, when Patreon was still small — and we didn't have a Patreon account, it was just friends and family — it was basically me and my ex-girlfriend and my brother and his girlfriend who's now his wife. It was the four of us, and then we'd just be like, oh, so-and-so's friend wants to come out for a month. And they'd come out, and it was always a rule that if you came to the boat, we all worked the same amount. So you'd cook, you'd clean, you'd film, and we'd teach you how to edit. Everyone shared all the duties, and everyone got all the rewards, basically. And then, as we went along, we just met people. I think, in the YouTube world, you get connected with other people who are videographers or filmmakers, and then you hit it off. Like, the guy Kirill — he still edits for us. We met him in South Africa, and he's an amazing videographer and editor, and he still does a lot of his stuff now. And then my girlfriend currently, she joined us in South Africa. We've been together for three years now. She sailed with us for three years. And she was into videography and photography and sailing and scuba diving when she joined. So it's really cool. We just get a bunch of kind of random people that organically flow into the project and bring their own taste and vibe, and we let them run with their creativity, and it always makes it really interesting from different perspectives of the group.

Tom Rowland: That's cool to be able to offer the people that have been watching your videos an opportunity to actually go there and be on the boat. That's pretty wild.

Brady Trautman: And then, like you were talking about patrons — a lot of the times, we'll put a bunch of our patrons' names in the hat, and we'll just pick a name out and be like, so-and-so's coming sailing with us.

Tom Rowland: Really? And do they show up?

Brady Trautman: Yeah, of course. I mean, we put out a post first and say, out of all of our patrons, who's available to come sailing? And then out of those people that say they're available or want to come, that's who we pick out of a hat. And we did it — me and my girlfriend crossed from Florida, Bermuda, Azores, Spain, and then back to the Caribbean. And from Spain — well, the Canary Islands — we picked a patron to join us, and that was a nineteen-day sail. It was just a guy who's a sailor but had never been able to cross an ocean. It was like a bucket-list item for him. So we asked him to join, and he joined us on that ocean crossing. It was a great experience for all of us, because when you have people on board that it's new to them, you get reignited from what you felt back in the beginning. So it's always cool to have fresh —

Tom Rowland: It's just like being a fishing guide, man. You take people that have never done it before, and all of a sudden you catch some little fish, and it's like — a lot of times the guide's more excited than the angler, because you kinda remember what that was like and how cool that was. But that's super cool that you give that opportunity.

Raising a Baby Aboard Delos

Tom Rowland: So how does it work with you and your brother? You just said that you and your girlfriend went to all those different places and had that one guy on the boat. Do you guys just, like, take a break from the boat for a little while? It seems like they're on it right now. Right? Your brother and his wife and their baby, which is incredible. I'm a dad — I'm a father of three. It was, let's just say, super challenging to raise a baby in a house. To do it on a boat — not that it's impossible — I find it really intriguing, because there's already a lot of challenges to raising a baby, period. Now you're doing it on a boat, and now you're doing it and moving from place to place and going across a whole ocean with a newborn. That's amazing.

Brady Trautman: It is. It's so incredible. For the first nine years, I guess, it was pretty much me and my brother all the time. His girlfriend, who's the wife now, joined us, like, seven years ago, and then my girlfriend joined three years ago. So there was, like, four of us that were the core group. Then when my brother and Karen, his wife, got pregnant, they flew off to Sweden to have the baby. She's from Sweden. So they flew off to Sweden to have the baby, and me and my girlfriend took over the boat for that season, that six-month season. So we got a couple friends of ours. We also did a scholarship where we put out for somebody between the ages of 16 and 22 to come along and experience crossing an ocean and learn. And we met this kid from the UK who's a film-school student. So we paid all expenses for him to come out and basically learn how to sail and make YouTube videos.

Tom Rowland: I hope he learned how to put on sunscreen.

Brady Trautman: He did. He was a great kid.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. So he came out. Did you see your production value go up when you have a film student out there?

Brady Trautman: Definitely. It was — I mean, we were a well-oiled machine when it's like me and my brother and our two partners. And then we took two of them out of the picture because they went to have a baby. So it was a lot of struggles, but at the same time, it gave room to adapt and to be creative in different ways, and other people took on roles that normally they wouldn't have if all four of us were on the boat. So it was challenging for sure, but we made about 16 episodes during that season, and I'm super proud of what we made. It was a great time overall. And then when we came back to the Caribbean, that's when my brother and his wife and the baby came back.

Burnout and Stepping Away to Lake Tahoe

Brady Trautman: And at that point — after you do something for so long — I honestly was just burnt out, man. I was just like, I've been traveling and moving for ten years. I don't have a home base. I don't feel like picking up the camera anymore. I'm just not creative. I kind of needed to step away for a minute. So me and my girlfriend came to Tahoe in December, basically, to take some time away from the boat, and let them continue on with the baby and have their family time. And then, of course, COVID hit, so it was like, well, I guess we'll stay in Tahoe a bit longer than planned.

Tom Rowland: Have you kinda had a yearning — I'm sure for a while, when you're burned out on anything, I've experienced it myself. You take some time away from it, and you don't miss it at all. Like, not at all. I don't miss that little boat one bit, and this house is awesome, and I haven't hit my head on the wall when the ocean does something crazy. Have you had the yearning to kinda go back yet?

Brady Trautman: It's just now starting. So I've been away from the boat now for, like, six months, and I'm just now like, oh, man, I'd love to go across an ocean, or I miss the feeling of being out there. Being in Tahoe, I'm so grateful to be here because it's just an incredible place. There's a huge lake that I get to sail on every couple days. There's hiking, there's camping. I couldn't be in the city right now, I guess. And I definitely miss sailing, but because I am where I am, I'm really lucky to not yearn for it as much as maybe I would.

130 Days Stuck in the Bahamas

Brady Trautman: And the cool thing we were just talking about was the baby on board — and Brian and Karen, they were in the Bahamas. They went to the Bahamas after we left, and they got stuck there for, like, a hundred and thirty days or something.

Tom Rowland: I know. Those were the videos that I was checking out. Those are the first ones that I saw. A hundred and thirty days on the boat, and that's when I started looking into the boat. I was like, well, how long could they stay on this boat? Because I've got some friends in the Bahamas, and there were no COVID cases in the Bahamas for a while. And they weren't letting people on there. So what did they do? Could they radio in and they would go put supplies out on the dock for them or something? Is that how it works?

Brady Trautman: They were really remote. They were in the Ragged Islands. So they were really far from Georgetown. There's an island around the corner — I don't know the name of it — but a mail boat, like a mail ferry, would come once every week or once every two weeks, and they would put the order of the fresh produce in on the mail boat. So the fresh fruit would come in on the mail boat. But at the anchorage they're at, talk about self-sufficient. During the legal lobster season, they were out catching their lobster and catching fish and making their own water. It's a dream, really, for a lot of people. Me, I was like, I'm kinda good where I am right now.

Tom Rowland: I mean, it's a dream for a lot of people for two weeks. A hundred and thirty days on a 53-foot boat when nobody's letting you get on dry ground and you have a baby — dang, dude. I have a lot of respect for that, man.

Brady Trautman: I know.

The Future of Life Aboard for the Family

Tom Rowland: Yeah. It's serious. So do you talk about, like, how long do you think they might want to continue to live on a boat with a baby? I don't wanna discourage them, but that's gotta be super challenging. And there's gotta be at some point where you're kinda like, man, it would be nice to have a big floor for the baby to play on, and other kids and stuff like that. So what are their plans?

Brady Trautman: Delos is a pretty big boat when it comes to just two people and a baby living aboard. I think they have plenty of space, and the mindset that they have about life and about traveling and experiencing the world — I think they're completely fine living on that boat forever. I think they'll adapt, and they love it for what it is, and they'll raise a beautiful daughter on board. And it was kind of a good catalyst for me and my girlfriend at the time to evolve as well, because I'm never gonna live on the boat full time again. I did that for ten years, and now it's time to do something different and move on to something, and have them raise their baby on the boat. It's just beautiful the way it's evolved. But like I said, I don't think they'll want to move on to land anytime soon.

Tom Rowland: Look, they seem perfectly happy. Just — thriving. You watch those videos, and you're like, yeah, this is exactly what they wanna be doing. It's really cool. And it's so alternative. It's a chosen lifestyle that a lot of people think is completely impossible. And I just love stories like that, where people have just figured it out. They're like, well, this is what we wanna do, and we're gonna figure it out. And you know what? Sooner or later, some kind of technology comes along and makes it possible for you to have Patreon or YouTube or podcasts or blogs or something, and there's some sort of way that you can make a living doing anything. I'm quite a big believer in that. I believe that if you've got the passion and the enthusiasm and the want-to, that you can make anything happen. You may have to think really creatively. Obviously, if no one has ever done this the way that you're doing it, then it's been difficult for some people. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible. And with enough creative thinking, you can make it happen. I've seen it with fishing guides. I've seen it with hunting guides. This backpacker — a professional backpacker. That's crazy talk. Who thinks you could be a professional backpacker? But she's pulling it off, man, and she's doing it with a very similar recipe to what you guys have figured out, completely independent of one another — that there are these little tools, and you can put them to work. And if you do a good job and put your heart into it, people will respond and support you.

Brady Trautman: I think that's what I was saying earlier too. As long as you do something with passion — you do it because you love it and not to make a career out of it — eventually it's gonna work out. Like you said, there's gonna be something that comes into your path, into the world, that makes it possible for you to make a living from it. If you just push long enough, stick to your passions, follow your heart, it will eventually work out.

What's Next: The Cruisers Academy

Tom Rowland: So what's next for you?

Brady Trautman: Well, we were gonna start what we call the Cruisers Academy, and it was basically like a hands-on school for people who wanna go and do this — live on a boat full time. So we wouldn't just keep sailing, we would teach how do you make water, how does the water maker work, how do you check weather — all these kinds of things that go with living on a boat full time, not just the skill of sailing. That was supposed to happen this fall, but with COVID, nobody wants to travel internationally and all kinds of weird stuff going on. So we've scaled down and moved it to Lake Tahoe. We just started a sailing school up here in Lake Tahoe called the Cruisers Academy, and we started out teaching kids a couple days a week. And it's great, man. We get to go sailing and spread our knowledge of sailing to these kids up here, and filming.

Tom Rowland: So when you start with kids, what kind of boats do you choose? What's the boat you choose to teach a kid how to sail?

Brady Trautman: Well, all this kinda fell into our lap. We found this boat in this lady's backyard, basically. It was covered in a tarp. It was an old wooden Snipe. So it's like a 15-and-a-half-foot wooden boat, and we found that boat literally the same week that all the summer camps in Tahoe got canceled. So these parents — the kids that were supposed to go to the summer camps — reached out to us personally and were like, hey, would you guys be interested in teaching private sailing lessons to our kids because the summer camp is closed? And I was like, well, we just found this boat that's totally wrecked. The wood's destroyed. How about we have the kids come out and re-varnish it, re-sand it, get it floating, and then we'll take it sailing? It'll be like this cool thing where they bring a boat back from the dead, and then we sail it. So that's how it happened the first two weeks. And then recently, we've just bought a Catalina 22 and moved on to the next step for the kids of doing it on a bigger boat. And we'll just see where it goes from there.

The Brother's Plans: Maine and the Northwest Passage

Tom Rowland: That's cool. And then your brother and his wife, are they really going north? Is that what the plan is? Because that's what it said on their videos, that they were thinking about going to Greenland.

Brady Trautman: Well, we were supposed to. I was supposed to be back on Delos pretty much by this point, and we were gonna start heading towards the Northwest Passage — trying to take the passage above Canada, come out over by Alaska. But Canada basically closed its borders because of all the indigenous tribes up there. They don't want any viruses affecting the smaller tribes. So Canada closed borders for pretty much the whole season. So going that far north as of right now is off. It could open up and it could happen. But I know Brian and Karen's next step is to move their way up to Maine and cruise around up there. There's so much beautiful sailing to do up there. And I think just spend summer in Maine and see what happens after that.

Tom Rowland: Summer in Maine is pretty cool. I've never spent an entire summer there, but I did go to a wedding there once, and the climate is super nice. It's like the Rocky Mountains in the West. In the summertime, it's hard to beat that, or the Florida Keys or the Bahamas in the winter. It's got that same kind of feel — kinda nice and cool and dry. I liked Maine. I'd like to spend more time out there.

Mountains Versus Ocean: Hot or Cold

Brady Trautman: Do you like cold environments?

Tom Rowland: I mean, I like them. I don't know that I wanna live in one. The joke is that I tried to live in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and that's how I ended up in Key West, because it was a little too cold. And I went as far south as you could possibly get and still stay in the United States. But I like the cold, certainly to visit. I like to ski. I like to be in the cold, but I don't know that I wanna live there. It's not that I wouldn't. It's just, I guess, if I had the choice, I'd probably pick hot rather than cold. What about you? Are you a hot person or a cold person?

Brady Trautman: I mean, I've been a hot person my whole life, and now I found myself in the mountains. I love it. I love snowboarding and skiing, and I love the snow. But I have to have both, I think. And that's what we're trying to create — to have, like, six months sailing in tropical, warm waters near the equator, and then have the mountain life as well on the other side.

Tom Rowland: The mountain life is awesome. I love it out there. I spent a lot of time in Jackson, Wyoming, and my boys are up in Bozeman, Montana. So I go and visit them, and I just love the Rocky Mountains. There's something about it. It's a really cool place, and you get to all those national parks. It's some of the most incredible country that we have available to us. And even in the Desert Southwest, I love that too. I like it all, man. I don't know that I could pick one that I would want to live there forever. But there are certain places that you get to that just have a feel to them, where you're just like, I feel the energy of this place. Like, Yellowstone National Park is one that I've mentioned a few times — I get in Yellowstone National Park, and I'm just like, wow, there's something special about this place. I felt the same thing in Hawaii. I felt the same thing in the Florida Keys. And as you just get to these places, it's like, I don't know what it is, but this place has extra energy to it.

Brady Trautman: It's a real good point, man. Because a lot of people are like, you're crazy — your identity as a sailor is to be out in the ocean and always near tropical waters, and then all of a sudden you just move to Tahoe, landlocked and up in the mountains. It's like, well, they both have the special attraction that is totally different, but still the same. It's just like the wilderness of the world that draws you in in both extremes.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. I mean, I can totally see it. You did this to a level that most people won't ever experience. And then you get to a place and you're like, time to move on. I wanna see something else. It's not like you're giving up on your dreams or anything. You did it, and you kinda were like, okay, it's time to move on, or at least time to experience something else and see if I like that as much as I like what you're doing on the boat. But to be able to do what you did for ten years, that's awesome, man.

Brady Trautman: It's a good run, man.

Sailing to Svalbard and the Documentary Series

Tom Rowland: Yeah, it's a good run. So in those places — were there a couple places that you think were the real jewels of what you got to see, like some of your favorites?

Brady Trautman: Yeah. I mean, speaking of cold weather, we did a sailing trip — it wasn't on Delos, it was on our friend's boat — we did a sailing trip up to Svalbard.

Tom Rowland: Where's that?

Brady Trautman: It's like northwest of Norway. It's only like 500 miles from the North Pole. It's way up in the Arctic Circle. And we got invited by some friends of ours that had a boat that has trips up there, to go sailing. And we spent, like, three weeks up there filming, and it's magical. We saw polar bears, beluga whales, and walrus, and all these things — calving glaciers. And actually, another thing that I've been working on since I've been landlocked here is editing that. We're doing, like, a mini-series. Evolving for this specific project, we're evolving out of the YouTube space, and we're doing a four-part mini-series. And it's in its final stages, and we don't know where it's gonna be released yet, but hopefully — it's in front of Netflix and Hulu and all the bigger guys to see if there's a market out there outside of YouTube for us to do these longer-format documentary-style episodes. So really stoked about that.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. And so a four-part series — is that, like, four thirty-minute episodes or four hour-long episodes, or what?

Brady Trautman: Thirty minutes. Yeah, they're about thirty minutes.

Tom Rowland: And is that kind of a sequential story, or do you have to watch them in order?

Brady Trautman: It is. I wanted to make it in a way that if you didn't know who Delos was, you could still watch it from the beginning and get an idea of who we are — like, we came from this, we have a YouTube channel, and we've been invited on this expedition kind of thing. So it's definitely sequential. It follows your way through three weeks up in the Arctic, and the crazy stuff that we see and run into, and the problems we have, and weather. It kind of just takes you through the whole process of coming from warm-weather sailing to what it's like to go up there. No board shorts and jumping off the boat.

The Arctic: Midnight Sun and Polar Bears

Tom Rowland: I can only imagine. Is the boat freezing up? Is that an issue? Like, you get the spray from the ocean, and it gets cold enough — in the fishing shows where they're up there doing the swordfishing and everything, it gets so cold that the ocean water is freezing on the boat, and they gotta go out there with sledgehammers and axes and knock it off. That seems too cold to me.

Brady Trautman: Yeah, luckily — I agree, man. We did our trip during the summer. So the air temperature was hovering right above freezing, and the water temperature was, like, a degree or two above freezing.

Tom Rowland: That's doable. I could do that.

Brady Trautman: It was doable. And the sun is always up in the summer. So literally the sun just goes above your head in a circle. It never — whether it's three in the morning or three in the afternoon, it looks exactly the same. You have no idea what time it is, which is great, because you'd spend the day sailing and you'd get to a place at two in the morning, and it's just, like, blue clear skies, and you're like, oh, let's go for a hike. It really just doesn't matter. You just slept when you were tired.

Tom Rowland: Wow. That's cool. I experienced that way north in Canada and then again in Alaska, not to that extreme, but you get way north and the days are super long, and it barely gets dark, and then it just starts to get light again. It's kinda weird if you haven't experienced that. But I tell you, I would much rather have it like that than the other way, of never really getting light in those same areas in the wintertime.

Brady Trautman: The other half of the year.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, man. That's where I think depression could get in there a little bit. It's just always dark and cold. So what about those polar bears that you're seeing up there? Because that is like — I have some experience with grizzly bears and black bears, and we see them and stuff in Yellowstone and other places. That is a big, incredible animal, the grizzly bear, but a polar bear is even bigger. I guess people don't get eaten by polar bears as much because there's not as much interaction, but I know that they would. And what they can do — they go down and get seals and whales and all kinds of things, man. That is a scary, scary animal. How did you see those from the boat?

Brady Trautman: So it's really interesting that in Svalbard, if you go on land, you're required to have a rifle with you for polar bear protection.

Tom Rowland: I don't doubt it. Good.

Brady Trautman: Yep. The polar bear danger is super serious up there, and you always have to have somebody watching your back when you're on shore. And luckily, these polar bears that we found — it was a mom and a cub — they were kind of walking on the shoreline. And we were in the boat, so we could see them from the water, which is kind of the best scenario possible. So we're not encroaching on their land. We're not offending them at all. And they found this old seal carcass that was probably years old. It was just bones, and they're sitting there trying to eat on it. And it was pretty sad, actually, to watch. We stayed with them for, like, an hour or so. They crossed over this other ridge, and we're just kinda following them on the shoreline. And then they found this huge chunk of blubber. It was like a whale carcass left over from last season, and it was almost like they started smiling. They just started inhaling blubber, licking their lips, growling. It was such a cool sight to see how their morale boosted from finding that terrible bony carcass to a big pile of blubber.

Tom Rowland: Wow. That's so cool.

Brady Trautman: We were in such a right place to film it and capture it all. It was a really great experience.

Tom Rowland: You had your good camera gear there? Did you have some big lenses? Could you get pretty close?

Brady Trautman: Yeah, we were probably only about 50 yards or so from shore where they were, so we were already pretty close. Maybe a little bit further than that, but we had big telephoto lenses on too.

Tom Rowland: That's amazing. That's really an opportunity of a lifetime, to be in a boat like that. I had an experience with a black bear kind of similar to that. We were on Jenny Lake with my dad, and there's a very, very popular trail that runs right along Jenny Lake and goes to Hidden Falls. And we look up, and here comes a black bear down this hill. And it gets right on the trail and just starts walking and doesn't associate us with anything. So we're just really close to the shore, got to watch that bear. And then here come these people down the trail — and this is just a black bear, not a polar bear like you're talking about — but my dad's like, should we tell them? And I'm like, man, I think if we tell them, we're gonna spook the bear or spook the people. Let's just see how this plays out. And the bear smells them, sees them, jumps up behind this big rock. The people walk in front. The bear walks back down on the trail and just kept on going his way. And then it happened, like, two or three other times. And that made me think, man, how often does that happen with a bear in the backcountry, where they know you're there, and they just don't want anything to do with you? They just hop up. Now, I don't know that that would be the case with a polar bear. I think a polar bear would lay down in the snow and wait for you to come and then eat you.

Brady Trautman: Yeah. And especially the ones that we're seeing — by that point, during the winter, the ice surrounds Svalbard, so it's completely covered in ice. And the polar bears, when the ice starts to retreat for the summer, they climb onto the ice because that's where they hunt seals. So these polar bears got left behind when the ice shelf melted away. So they're hungry. They're super hungry during the summer up there. And I would not wanna be on land with one of those bears searching for food. No way.

Tom Rowland: And what a predator. The thing is perfectly camouflaged. It looks exactly like every little hump of snow and ice out there. And then, man, what an incredible predator. They're huge too, right? The one you saw was really big?

Brady Trautman: Oh, yeah. It was a mom and a cub, and the mom — if it would have stood up straight, it would have been, like, eight or nine foot tall probably. Just with its paws, they're huge. They can be, like, a thousand pounds, no problem.

Tom Rowland: What an incredible animal, man. Huge. That's awesome. I can't wait to see that footage. That'll be cool.

Brady Trautman: Yeah. Hopefully it'll be released sometime this summer. We're hoping to release it. If nothing comes through with other stuff, we're just gonna self-publish and put it on our website. And, yeah — open it up to the world.

Evolving Beyond YouTube Into Documentaries

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. And so, is that kind of the new direction that you're taking now that you're on land, and then the YouTube stuff will continue as your brother and his wife and Sierra are hanging out on the boat doing their thing?

Brady Trautman: Yeah, I think so. We had a talk about this. Brian and Karen, they love doing the YouTube stuff, and they love running the channel and filming and editing the episodes of them and their family and stuff. And I, for the past couple years, have really wanted to move on to bigger feature-length documentaries and stuff, and evolve out of that. We'll see how this one goes. It's a good proving ground to see if this concept works. And if it does, then definitely we'll go and do some other ones — maybe do a Northwest Passage one, or a South Pacific one, or something that's a bit more work. We've been working on this series for two years now in the background while we're doing the YouTube stuff. We kinda come back and forth to it. And since I've been here, I've just spent a solid six months or so finalizing the editing and getting everything good to go.

Tom Rowland: And did you contract with somebody, like an agent, that can get it in front of Netflix and Hulu, or did you take that on by yourself too?

Brady Trautman: We took a lot of that on by ourselves, just through random contacts. You'd be surprised who watches the show, who watches Delos. People reach out and say, oh, I'm a producer here, I do this. And then you're like, hey, put this in front of people. And that's kinda what's happening now — it's out in front of some people, and we'll just see what comes back, if people are interested or not. We'll just go from there. It's all word of mouth.

Tom Rowland: You've made it work so far. I have no doubt that either that'll pan out or something else like we talked about. You just never know. But it's obvious that people really like what you guys have done and continue to do. It's awesome, man.

Brady Trautman: Thanks, man. I appreciate it.

Where to Find SV Delos

Tom Rowland: So if people wanted to find the channel, find your Patreon, what would they do? How would they find that?

Brady Trautman: The best thing is to go to our social media stuff. So, SV Delos. If you search SV Delos in Google, you'll see our YouTube, so definitely subscribe to that — it helps a lot. And our Instagram account, you can find all the more current stuff, because the YouTube videos are, like, a month or so of production time behind. So the current stuff of where Delos is and what's going on is at SV Delos on Instagram, and that's where we'll be releasing all the info.