Capt. Rick Moore: Building a 130K Sailing YouTube Channel

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 357, Capt. Rick Moore...

Introduction: Meet Rick Moore of Sailing Sophisticated Lady

Rick Moore: As with anything major in life, things can become very daunting if you look at the big picture. But as soon as you focus on one part of it and fix that first, then go to the next part, then you just work your way down the ladder. It's the same thing with how you get here. You're not just gonna sell everything you own one day, but you're gonna start that thought process at some point and say, okay, I just wanna migrate towards this direction. So what do I need to do in order to get there? Well, people ask me that all the time. The first thing I tell them is stop buying stupid shit.

Rick Moore: Greetings, everybody. I'm Captain Rick Moore from Sailing Sophisticated Lady, and welcome to the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: What's up, everybody? I got a great guest for you today, Captain Rick Moore. If you know him from YouTube, he's got about 130,000 subscribers on YouTube. He's very popular. He takes his boat all over the place, and right now, he is in Colombia. One of the things that I like to do on this podcast is to seek out people who are living life on their own terms, people who have found something that they're very passionate about and figured out a way to make a living at it no matter how unlikely that is. We've done that with people like Jessica Dixie Mills, who is now a professional backpacker, if you can imagine that. But she has done it. She's been able to figure out a way to do it. Rick Moore has been able to figure out a way to live on this sailboat, travel around, and make videos for YouTube, as well as doing some chartering and all kinds of other things along the way. We talked to him about this journey in his life and different places where he pivoted and changed his approach or changed his goals. And you know what? I ask Rick about something that people ask me about all the time, which is how do you follow your passion? How do I jump and do what it is that I wanna do? I have a dream. I have something that I wanna do. How do I do that? How do I do what you're doing? You know? And people ask Rick the same thing, and he offered some of the best advice that I've ever heard on this podcast. And I think you're gonna wanna hear it. Check out this interview with Captain Rick Moore of Sailing Sophisticated Lady.

Anchored in San Andres, Colombia

Tom Rowland: Captain Rick Moore of Sailing Sophisticated Lady, how are you today?

Rick Moore: Yes, sir. I'm doing well, Tom, and thanks for the invite.

Tom Rowland: Hey, man. Thank you for taking time out. Are you in Colombia? Is that where you are right now?

Rick Moore: We are. We are sitting anchored in San Andres, Colombia, and it's a beautiful little island — about 450 miles from Colombian mainland. So we're kind of out in the western Caribbean Sea, also about 150 miles from Nicaragua. So it's very remote, cut off from everything. But we have beautiful weather here. We're below the hurricane zone, so we don't have to worry about big storms or anything like that.

Tom Rowland: Nice.

Rick Moore: And it's sunny all the time. We just went through a bit of a rainy spell, but right now, you know what I mean? I've set up the boat to be fully self-sufficient. So it produces all its own energy, water, everything like that. And it's a perfect location for us because we have a lot of sunshine for the solar panels, and we have perfectly clear seawater under the boat for producing drinking water from the ocean water.

Tom Rowland: Wow. So tell me about your boat. I've been watching a lot of your videos, and it seems like, like you just mentioned, you're completely self-sufficient. You made a big solar transition sometime back. Tell me about the boat.

Rick Moore: Well, the boat is a 1996 Jeanneau International, and it was built in France. One of the things I really liked about the boat is that it was built before they started building them lighter, faster, cheaper. It's heavier — the same size of boat that they make now, this one weighs about 10,000 pounds more. But because the hull is solid fiberglass, there's no coring in it. All the bulkheads are solid. It's a very rock solid boat. The rigging is way oversized for the boat. When I had it surveyed fifteen years ago, the guy looked at it and said, "I thought you were buying a charter boat because this thing's built like a tank." I'm like, oh, I like to hear that. Thank you.

Tom Rowland: Well, that's what you need. Right? I mean, where have you taken this boat?

Rick Moore: Well, me and Sophisticated Lady, I've got about 100,000 sea miles on this boat so far. Most of it has been sailing back and forth to Canada. When I first bought it back in 2005, I moved aboard in May 2005 full time, and I've been on board ever since. Basically, that's when I sold everything and moved aboard and sailed off into the sunset, so they'd say.

Leaving Canada and the Doctor's Warning

Rick Moore: Yeah, back then, I used to take the boat back and forth. I bought it in order to get away from the rat race, to get out of Canada. I had big stress issues. The doctor told me once — I was ending up in the doctor's office all the time, and he looked at me one time and said, "Look, you never end up in the doctor's office, and you're here, like, every couple months now. There's an issue." So he gave me clearance. He said, "You know what? You need to change your life. You have two choices — stay here and die, or go do something else."

Tom Rowland: Really?

Rick Moore: No, I just said, okay, well, that's my cue. So I sold everything off, and, yeah, I dealt with the "oh, you're crazy, you lost your mind, what happened to you?" Well, yeah, I just decided I'd rather live out there than die here.

Tom Rowland: And how old a person were you when your doctor's telling you this?

Rick Moore: 39.

Tom Rowland: Wow. So you were very stressed. What was making you so stressed? Let's back up a little bit — would you mind taking us through your story? Because, you know, you watch the videos on YouTube — I've been trying to catch up, I'm a new viewer. I'm fascinated with what you're doing and your story and how you're doing it, but I don't really know any of the backstory. So how did you get so stressed, I guess? Take me back to the beginning.

Early Life in Canada and the First Trip to Florida

Rick Moore: Well, I mean, I guess the beginning of that type of thing always starts with personal relationships — love, marriage, kids, all the rest of it. I met my first major girlfriend in high school at 15, and we were basically high school sweethearts. We dated for years. But there were times in between where she was off with somebody else, I was off with somebody else. I just did not like life in Canada. I'm not a winter person whatsoever, since birth. I used to play in the snow — okay, cool. I used to ski — okay, cool. I used to love snowmobiling and all of that, but it's just a great way to get stranded far away from home when your engine dies in the cold. So I just got tired of winter sports and not being able to feel my fingers. And even back then, I was always into remote control hobbies — airplanes, helicopters, all that stuff — and you can't do any of that for at least six months of the year because your hands freeze. So I don't know, I just decided that I wanted something different, and I hopped in my car one time and said to my friend, "Let's go down and check out Florida. Just have a look around and see what it's like." It was January in Canada, the worst time of the year, and I just wanted to get out of the cold. So we went down, and I was like, yeah, this is for me.

Tom Rowland: Yeah.

Rick Moore: I mean, nice breezes, palm trees, girls in bikinis, blue ocean everywhere. I wasn't even thinking about boats at that point — I just did not like the cold. So at 19 years old, the first time, I sold everything, put everything I had left — I had two cars, one was a Chevy Cavalier, my first car, and the other was an old Porsche 914 that was in pristine condition, but that was my favorite. So we loaded everything into the two cars — I got my buddy to drive my one car, I took the Porsche, took the roof out, and we zipped down to Florida. I ended up staying down there for a year. I got a condo down there and—

Tom Rowland: What part of Florida were you in?

Rick Moore: Just west of Fort Lauderdale. It was called Plantation.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, nice. Know it a little bit.

Rick Moore: So I spent time down there, and then, of course, I got familiar with the Keys, as you say. My favorite place in the world was Key Largo and down in Islamorada. I used to go down there all the time and hang out at Kokomo on the weekends — we'd go camping at the Key Largo Campground for weekends and then buzz down to the Kokomo bar, whatever it's called down there, and just hang out. That became my life for a year, but, of course, I didn't know anything about green cards or anything — I just kinda moved in and said, yeah, let's just go, I just wanna get out of the snow. So I ended up selling off a lot more of my stuff just to keep the bills paid and stayed there as long as I could hold out. And then I ended up turning around and coming back to Canada. But while I was down there is when I spent all my time training in electronics, because at the time — we're talking late eighties, I think — the big boom down there was big car audio systems. So I got heavy into automotive electronics because that was a passion of mine also, car stereos and stuff. So I did a lot of training, made a lot of contacts, moved back to Canada, and started my second business, which was Auto Acoustics in Kitchener, Ontario.

From Car Audio to Boats: The First Powerboat

Tom Rowland: Well, that makes a little bit more sense, because watching your videos, you seem to be able to fix everything or improvise everything, which, if you own a boat or live on a boat, I'm sure is an absolute necessity. Whether you're good at it or not, you're gonna have to get good at it. But you seem to have a pretty good talent at it, being able to fix just about anything.

Rick Moore: Yeah, it's all about problem solving, just being able to analyze problems. You look at something and say, okay, if this is not working, then you break it down to why is it not working. Does it not have power? Is it broken? Is there a bad wire somewhere? You just have to break it down into individual components. As with anything major in life, things can become very daunting if you look at the big picture. But as soon as you focus on one part of it and fix that first, then go to the next part, you just work your way down the ladder. It's the same thing with how you get here. You're not just gonna sell everything you own one day, but you're gonna start that thought process at some point and say, okay, I just wanna migrate towards this direction. So what do I need to do in order to get there? Well, people ask me that all the time. The first thing I tell them is stop buying stupid shit. Most of the things that hold people back are buying things they don't really need and racking them up on credit cards because they have credit available, and everybody loves to live on the limit of their credit. That's a big problem, and that's what holds most people back from doing something like this. It wasn't really much different for me, except that I was lucky — I never got fully loaded, and I was married to an accountant, so she didn't like debt much, and that was good for me. We only used debt when absolutely necessary, and I kind of used that to get started in this. Because with Auto Acoustics, my first business was car stereo and security systems. That's what got me into working on boats also, because customers would bring them in and say, "Hey, I got this nice little racer, whatever, ski boat — I wanna put a stereo in it, I wanna put a security system on it." And I started looking at these boats going, wow, this is pretty cool, wonder what one of these costs. And we ended up getting a small one — I bought, with my wife, a Chaparral 21-foot little sport boat, and it needed a ton of work, but I stripped it down to fiberglass and redid everything from the bottom up. New interior, new paint job, and I did it all in my shop. I had a good shop with an air compressor, so we sealed it all off one day and painted it up with this fancy paint job, put in a new stereo, full new consoles, new seats, new engine covers, everything, and just made this mini Don Johnson boat out of this little 21-foot Chaparral.

Tom Rowland: Nice. Nice. That's cool. And then did that boat take you — do you want a bigger boat, or do you want a different kind of boat at some point?

Rick Moore: Oh, yeah. We lasted five years with that boat, but we used to live inland — we lived in a town called Kitchener, Ontario, and that town is landlocked. There's no water anywhere, it's between all the Great Lakes, but it's a long drive to get to the water. And my family, in the meantime, had moved up to Barrie because they were into boats also, and they had a 24-foot boat up in Georgian Bay. So they moved up to Lake Simcoe, which was where Barrie is, and that became our hometown for our family. My whole family is still there because they all love it. But that was where I really got interested in the boating aspects of being able to go to remote locations — take it out to places where nobody else can go unless you have a boat, and go camping on shore because it wasn't a big enough boat to live on or anything like that. But that was always my thing, just being in remote places, self-sufficient, on your own, quiet, just you and the mosquitoes.

Discovering Sailing

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Yeah. And then at what point do you look towards a sailboat instead of a powerboat?

Rick Moore: Well, about five years in, I started getting bored with the boat because, first of all, it was getting expensive to run. You couldn't take it out for a couple hours, and it was a hundred dollars in fuel just gone. And that's something I do not like — I just never liked spending that much money on fuel for anything. Even though I was considering, well, I'm bored, I must need a faster boat or something like that. One time when we were down in Florida, my wife and I came across this 28-foot Scarab with twin 350s in it. I thought, wow — remember, it was called Moondancer or something like that, had some name with the moon, and I was always fascinated with the moon, I love the full moon all my life. But we saw this boat on the side of the road, had a look at it and everything, and I thought, maybe I need something like this. But when I got back to Canada that summer, before I was really thinking seriously about doing any upgrades, a friend of mine took me out on a little boat that he had — it was like a 17 or 18-foot day sailboat, just a little tiny sailboat, nothing but the rudder and the sails and just you and the sails. And he took me out for an afternoon, said, "Here, try this." Well, after an hour, I was hooked. I was like, wow — no engine, no throttle, just you and the sails. Combine that with the tiller, and it was like a game for me, like a puzzle trying to figure out the mechanics of it and how the sails worked with the wind and everything. I was hooked. Took me about an hour, and then after that, he used to trade me — I'd give him the powerboat for the day, I'd take the sailboat, and I'd just go out and play around with it. And that winter, I decided, okay, it's time to sell the powerboat, and I put it up for sale just to find anybody who would trade any kind of sailboat for that powerboat. And I ended up trading it in New York, across the border. I found somebody who had — I had researched what was gonna be a good boat to start with, and there were a few I was looking at, old Columbias and stuff like that, but I came across a Catalina 30. It was my luck — I just happened to find this boat somewhere, but Catalina was a really good name, a really good, well-built boat, and it's a great coastal cruiser. It wasn't something I would have considered for offshore, but I wasn't thinking offshore at any stretch — I was just thinking something to learn sailing on. But I ended up trading in the boat, buying the Catalina, brought it back to Canada. Again, I just stripped it down — I put seven years worth of work into that boat, and it was perfect. I still have pictures just before I sold it, it was meticulous. But I did crazy stuff to that boat, like replaced all the windows with my own custom designs. And we cut the keel because the keel was too deep, and I couldn't get into our yacht club after, like, September, which meant for two months, I couldn't even go sailing. So I was like, no, no, no, that's not happening. So I found a place in Toronto called Mars Metal, and they do lead work. They said, yeah, if you take this much off your keel, bring us that piece, we'll melt it down with 30% more lead, put some bulbs together, you take them back, and bolt it to your old keel. Sounds easy enough.

Tom Rowland: And how much draft did that take off?

Rick Moore: It took me from — what was it — it was five foot four, and I took it down to four and a half.

Tom Rowland: Okay.

Rick Moore: Four and a half would get me safely in and out of the marina all season so that I could keep sailing until the last possible day.

Tom Rowland: Nice. And then, at this point, you didn't have any kind of ambition for taking it back down to warmer weather, or were you happy just kinda learning how to sail at this point?

Rick Moore: Oh, no. Yeah, that boat got me into the whole aspect of — there is a possibility for indefinite, sustained travel here.

Tom Rowland: Wow. That's gotta be a big moment. Like, in my life, as soon as I realized that being a fishing guide was a real job — I didn't know anyone that was a fishing guide, I didn't know anyone that sustained themselves like that, until I was around a couple of people, and then I was like, wow, you could just do this, like, this is a job. And it seems like that's kind of the crossroads you come to there — like, you could just live on this boat all the time.

Rick Moore: You could just live on the boat, and the boat is much less expensive to live on than anything. It is a mobile house, and it may cost you an investment upfront, but you don't have land taxes, you don't have car payments, you don't have car insurance, you don't have all these other associated things, high electricity, hydro, whatever. All these things disappear when you migrate to a boat. Now, the problem is, you can't migrate full time to a boat in Canada, so hence the direction changes. I just started leaning towards, okay, well, what's it gonna take to make this sustainable? And I started taking training for long-term benefits. I decided, okay, this is something I would like to do in retirement. So I was always thinking ahead — what am I gonna wanna do in twenty years from now, thirty years from now? And I thought, well, a great job would be captain of a sailboat down in the Caribbean. I figured that that would be something I could do in the wintertime. And in the summertime, I'd be a bush pilot, flying people up and down into remote locations up in Muskoka, up in Ontario.

Tom Rowland: Were you already a pilot?

Rick Moore: No, but I was doing that at the same time. I was taking my captain's license for marine, and I did that over several years. And at the same time, I was doing my pilot's license, for a bush pilot. And I was enjoying the flying to a point — it was a thrill doing something that not many people get to do. But to be honest, every time I was up there, I'd be like, okay, I'm bored. Unless I was doing tumbles and turns and stall recoveries, that was the kind of stuff I liked — that was fun. But you can't do that with a bush plane. So that's what I was training and enjoying, but then what happened was the company that I was taking my lessons for — they were prepaid up to almost completion, and we were halfway through the training, and the company folded, went bankrupt. All the planes disappeared, everything was gone, and all my money was gone. I was like, I think that's a sign — I wasn't meant to fly. So I put my focus back into the marine side training, and I continued training just while I was working. I did about eight to ten years of training just in Canada, and I would spend every weekend in the wintertime in my basement — I made a room, maybe about the same size as the salon in this boat now, with a ten-foot screen. And I used to have my friends over every Sunday, and we'd have sailing day. We'd rent a bunch of videos from down in Toronto where they had all the cruising videos — that's where I used to get the offshore sailing videos and all these other cruising documentaries that existed back then, but there was no computers, no internet, anything like that, so it was all VHS tapes. We'd rent, like, five or six VHS tapes from this bookstore down in Toronto, and they'd send them up every weekend, and we'd have a crash party in my basement and just watch sailing videos. We were studying stuff constantly, learning and absorbing all this material, watching the crazy stuff — the round-the-world races, the single-handed solo sailing around the world — and how these guys would do it and how they sustained themselves, how they stayed alive and stayed sane, what they did in storm tactics, and just mentally preparing yourself for all this stuff. And then, yeah, I became a storm chaser on Lake Simcoe. That's what everybody called me, the crazy storm chaser, because when it was blowing crazy, I'd be out untying the lines going sailing. They'd be like, "What are you doing?" I'm going sailing. They're all there putting extra lines, securing the boat so it doesn't blow off in the storm, and I'm like, no, this is windy, man, it's time to go sailing. So I gained a bit of a reputation like that, but that just kept me growing in that direction, migrating more and more towards this life on the sea, becoming prepared for whatever the worst was that the ocean was gonna throw at me. Because I knew that there was one thing that's gonna challenge you, and it's gonna be the ocean. You can't fight mother nature — you just live with it and mutually coexist, or you die. That's the basics.

Marriage, Divorce, and the Decision to Leave

Rick Moore: So, eventually, that led to my wanting to upgrade to a little bit bigger boat. I'd already fixed this one up as much as I could possibly fix without starting to redo all the stuff I'd already done again. So we got into a 36-foot boat because my wife is not really a sailor — she likes creature comforts and wanted a bigger boat. But at the end of the day, she just decided that sailing wasn't for her. She didn't like sailboats, and she didn't like anybody who liked sailboats. And that's where it landed, being in a divorce at some point — we just had the two kids. I met her at 15, we moved in together at 21, we got married at 30, then had two kids and divorced by 36. So that's the story. But she works in my family business — at that time I had migrated out of my own business because she didn't like the ups and downs of being in our own business. She wanted me to have steady pay, so I started working with my family business, which is still in Barrie, a water treatment business called Aquamart. She's the accountant for that business, and so we ended up divorcing and going through all these battles and still working together every day. So that was very stressful. And at the end of the day, that was when the stress started building up, at that 36-year-old age. And then by 38, 39, it was over the top, and it's just like, okay, gotta leave.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. So when you decided on this exit plan, had you already upgraded to this next boat that is the Sophisticated Lady that you're in now, or is it another boat?

Rick Moore: Oh, that came soon after the doctor's warning.

Tom Rowland: Right. Yeah. So you upgrade the boat, and then let's talk about that transition. Like, you're now gonna make this exit plan — the doctors warned you, and you're gonna heed it. So then what comes next? Do you go straight for the Caribbean, or what?

Rick Moore: I think I did a kind of an introspection — just examined my life for a month or so, deciding what do I wanna do. What I gotta do something different. I could go back and just start another electronics business or something, but what's that gonna do? It's still gonna keep me in Canada here, and that's half my stress — just being not able to do what I enjoy, which is go sailing, being on the water, being out there on my own doing something. You can't do it for at least six months of the year, and that's very hard on somebody like me. So it just evolved there, and I finally started thinking, well, I got all this training, why don't I put some of this training to use? What am I waiting till retirement to get to be a captain in the Caribbean for? I started researching, well, what do people do with sailboats in the warm weather down in the Caribbean? We had always thought originally that we'd just take the boat for a year down to the Bahamas, test the theory, see how it worked, come back, go back to work, then plan long term from there. But then I discovered that going to the Bahamas for me was the short term thing — it was never gonna be long term, and you can't stay there during hurricane season, and it's too cold in the wintertime because they get cold fronts every three, four days blowing down from Canada. So that's just not my thing, to be sitting down there wearing sweaters and foul weather gear. So I started looking a little deeper and going further, examining the Caribbean, and that's when I discovered the charter business in the British Virgin Islands. And I thought, okay, now we're talking — that's something I could live with, and that was a very popular area, lots of people interested in going there to charter. So I started looking at what kind of boats.

Tom Rowland: What year is this?

Rick Moore: This would be 2004.

Tom Rowland: Okay, so way before the internet, like, probably as we know it today. And where were you getting all this information — how to do this, what it takes, what kind of qualifications or red tape you gotta go through to join that fleet down there?

Rick Moore: Well, again, still renting videos and stuff, but now on DVD, not VHS.

Tom Rowland: One step closer.

Rick Moore: One step closer. But the internet was around, so we did have access — not like we do now, of course, but there was some access. And I was able to find how some of these businesses were advertising on the internet, with websites and pictures, some videos, and stuff like that. So we started researching all these boats that were working full time in the British Virgin Islands and doing what I wanted to do. Then I started looking at, okay, what kind of boat is it gonna take to do this? How much is it gonna cost me? And can I really afford to do it right now? Well, obviously I couldn't, because I just come out of a divorce, and I had a boat we'd bought not too long ago that still had a bit of a mortgage on it. So I started looking at options — how am I gonna do this? And I found a boat — actually I found a couple of different boats. One of them was way out of my price range, which was this one — it was way beyond what I could have afforded in any scope of reality. It was worth almost three times what we paid for our house.

Tom Rowland: Mhmm.

Rick Moore: But the owners of the boat had had it for years, and the wife hated it — she didn't like it. They'd gone down to the Bahamas and did that circuit once or twice maybe, but she was tired of it. They wanted to get back to something smaller because she was a smaller person too, and had real problems finding handholds when it was bouncing around on the sea. So it came up for sale in January 2005, basically, is when I found it, listed at one of the boat shows. I'd been on the boat previously that summer before, when we were just randomly looking around at boats to get a feel for what these size of boats were like inside and what they cost. And I remember being on the boat, and I was like, no, this is way too big, we couldn't do anything with this — there's just so much empty space in it. What are you gonna do with this? We were focused on 44-foot, 45-foot. So when I came across this boat and it was way out of the price range, I was like, no, move on, next boat. But then it came available at the Toronto International Boat Show in January, and I knew the brokers because they'd listed it with the same broker that I'd bought my previous boat from. And they said, you know, the owner's kinda desperate, they just wanna move the boat, so you should have a look at it, and we'll offer yours as a trade-in. That way, at the time, you could offer a trade and not have to pay any tax on that trade value, which was also a considerable savings for me. So I did go look at it, and the broker was like, "Man, you gotta be interested in this boat." We showed up on a Saturday or Sunday morning — it was minus thirty Celsius, blowing like crazy, it was freezing cold. Even the broker was like, "I don't really wanna go to this boat right now — do we really have to go?" But we went because we drove all the way down, and I had a bunch of people with me because we were examining it a little closer this time and filming the inside to see what it looked like. So we came inside the boat and checked it all out for about half an hour and then left.

Buying the Boat and Quitting the Job

Rick Moore: But, anyway, the long and short of it was, yeah, we did end up making an offer. The offer was still beyond what I could afford, but it was still subject to finance, and I needed financing. I needed to do that on my own because I was divorced and working on my own, in my own business, just making my own money. So I kept going to banks, going to banks, going to banks — no, no, no. But I'm never one who gives up, and that's another thing — if you want something bad, and you just never give up, you find a way. And it's been like that through my whole life, from my first business till even where I am now. I finally found one, and they examined it and said, okay, sure, yes. Boom — they signed the papers, I gave the deposit, we made the deal, everything was ready to go. And as soon as I knew everything was rock solid and nobody could back out of anything, I put in notice and quit my job. And that's when people think you've lost your mind.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Well, that is — so you've got a bunch of different kinds of people around you. You've got these guys that have been hanging around on Sundays watching sailing videos, and then you've got the rest of the people around. Did you get two different kinds of reactions from these guys? Are the people that are watching sailing videos with you super happy about what you're thinking about doing, or do they think you've lost your mind?

Rick Moore: They think I've lost my mind, but they're still super happy. They're still like, "Go, Rick, go, Rick — crash or burn, it doesn't matter, just do it." Because I was like, alright, I'm putting everything on the line — if it works, I'm gonna try it for a year, if it works, I keep going, and if we don't like it, it's not working, well, what's the worst thing that happens? We come back, we sell the boat, we lose the mortgage, we go back to work, I've lost a year, but at least I tried. That was my mindset at the time. I mean, I knew I still couldn't do it on my own — this is an expensive boat to run. So, at the time, I qualified for the mortgage, but that just paid for the boat — now I had to find a way to pay for it. So I started looking for partners, people who would be interested after I'd already made the commitment, so everybody knows, alright, he's in this, he's serious. And I found a couple people that were interested. One was a friend that I just met in Barrie, and he's actually a doctor in Barrie, so he kind of understood what drove me to make this decision in the first place. He's like, yeah, I can see the drive in this guy, and I think he's driven to success. So he was willing to become my partner, and his name was Dr. Charles Vanderwater. He ran a practice in Barrie for many, many years — he just retired this year, actually — but he was the one that signed up and said, yes, I will give you your funding capital to keep going for the first year until you get the business moving, and then we'll see what happens and reassess. So he put in the funds to help me keep the business going, which allowed me to buy the things we needed to upgrade the boat, make the mortgage payments, keep us fed. We weren't looking for much — I was living not lavishly at all, budget basement, as low as we could, just to keep things going and get the boat down to the British Virgin Islands and get set up. And we did our first few charters that year, got some good reviews, and that helped lead into the next year. Everybody was happy — I was happy, he was happy. It takes a long time for a business like this to get rolling and actually become profitable, because we came out of nowhere, and we went into places where nobody was expecting us — they didn't know we were coming, and we had to set everything up from scratch as we went. But we just kinda felt our way through in the dark, and eventually we found our way.

Rick Moore: Unfortunately, in 2007, the world recession hits, and the tourism business is the first thing to just go straight down the toilet. So, yeah, we ran into some big trouble then, and I just about lost the boat several times to the bank. But even my parents — their business was stable because it's kind of a life-necessity type business, residential water treatment, drinking water, that kind of stuff — and they didn't wanna see me lose everything, so they came to the rescue a couple of times and just said, "Okay, look, don't let the bank take it, just make whatever is necessary, keep it going and keep doing what you're doing." And I did — I mean, I was doing that anyway. They told me to just keep going. At that time, they were still telling me don't give up, and eventually, after so many years, they were like, "When is he gonna give up?"

Tom Rowland: That's what my dad said. He was like — my dad says people told him he should take his son fishing when he was a kid, and then he thought maybe he should have taken him to work a couple of times. That's his dad joke that he tells all the time, but that's how I ended up being a professional fisherman, I guess. Do you remember your first charter? Like, the first one? How did that go? Did it go well?

Rick Moore: Yeah. It was a last-minute Christmas charter, and it was a retired couple from the States, and they flew down. They just wanted something last minute — we were available because we were new, and they decided to give us a chance. The brokers offered us at a discount because we were new, and they wanted to find out how we were. So they said to the people, "Look, this is a new boat, new couple, we would need a review — so you tell us good or bad, just tell us what happens, and this will get you a discounted rate." And they came down and tried the boat out, and we looked after them. They had, apparently, a great time — they gave us a five star review, left us a 25% tip at the end of the week, which, in the charter business, is really good. So we were very happy, the charter agency was very happy, and they started recommending us more, putting us out to more of the charter booking agents all over the world. And we started getting a few more charters — I think the first year, we might have done four or five. It's not a lot, but, again, like I said, it takes a long time to build a business. You gotta build a reputation. Nobody wants to spend eight to ten thousand dollars on an uncertain element.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Rick Moore: This is their once-a-year holiday, so it's very important to them — not so much the boat, the boat will always be good or bad, you can usually tell by previous reviews, but the personalities you're gonna be with on the boat, that's the important thing, because who you're hanging out with is what's gonna make or break your vacation.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Rick Moore: And you basically become their best friends for a week. So it's a very, very exhausting job, because not only are you looking after the boat, you're looking after the meals, cleaning the cabins, and if something breaks on the boat, everything stops until I fix it — and my crew would have to take them ashore or do something else while I stay behind and work on whatever the problem is.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, it never stops. Unlike the fishing business, where we pick people up at 5 in the morning and drop them off in the afternoon — you know, we have similar issues, like you gotta fix the boat, stuff always breaking, you gotta fix that, get it prepared, ready to go for the next day, get your tackle ready — but you're doing that all by yourself, you're eating dinner with your family. What you're talking about never stops. It never stops.

Rick Moore: Never stops. You're holding their hand constantly, from the moment they wake up and waiting for their coffee until the moment they go to sleep because they've passed out from drinking — everybody parties on the charter boat. So you gotta be careful of that too — you can participate to a point, but you gotta keep distance from it because you still have responsibilities. Your main responsibility is to make sure that while they're partying, getting drunk, having fun, falling down, they don't fall off the boat and drown.

Tom Rowland: Exactly.

Rick Moore: Exactly. And that's a constant issue, especially in the afternoons when they're out drinking and partying and getting in and out of the dinghy — that's where a lot of accidents happen in the charter business, just getting in and out of the dinghy, which is your family car.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. So how long did you do this before you kinda moved into your next venture, the YouTube channel and the things that I'm kinda catching up with now?

The 2007 Recession and the Pivot to YouTube

Rick Moore: Well, 2010 is where it all started to transition, because 2007, that recession forced me to start looking at other options, because tourism was gone for two, three years minimum. Just like now, they killed it in a day, and who knows how long it's gonna be gone — it was exactly the same, because the first thing people lose as a recession approaches is their holidays, their vacations, all that kind of stuff. So that's what my business was — I had made the one tragic mistake of putting all my eggs in one basket, the first thing they teach you not to do. But I did anything it took to get out of that life in Canada and do something different, and that was kind of the expense. So that made me quickly realize, alright, I need to focus on some other talents here, something else I can do, and that's where I started focusing on video, because it was around that time, in 2007, the same year YouTube launched. So YouTube launched the same time as the recession started moving in, and I started using YouTube just as a platform to put up some of these little video clips of stuff around the boat, life on the boat, and stuff we'd be doing with guests on board — a lot of just animated picture shows at the time, really. And I was just putting them up on YouTube because I needed a place to host videos, since you couldn't just put a video on your website back then.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Rick Moore: Wasn't capable of it back then. YouTube was like, alright, I can put a video on a website and embed it there.

Tom Rowland: Right. At this point, is it all kind of to enhance your charter business? Like, once tourism ramps back up, you're gonna have a head start back into this by using these videos. Is that it?

Rick Moore: No, exactly — no, I was using it even when it hadn't ramped up. I discounted the charters and started approaching a different audience, no more luxury charters, that was way out of everybody's budget. I just said, let's go sailing with Captain Rick. So that's what started happening around 2009. And that's when I was just doing charters for people for $3,000 to $4,000 instead of $8,000 to $10,000 — no food and all that. They come down, they're part of the experience, they start looking after themselves, they do their own cooking or eat on shore, whatever they want. I'm a captain, I take them around anywhere they wanna go and keep them safe and make sure the boat's safe. I make weather decisions every single day — I say, okay, well, today it's gonna be like this, so our best two choices are here or here, you can do this here or that there, what do you prefer, and then we go based on their decisions. So there was no set itinerary — all my itineraries were very fluid, we had different options all the time depending on what the people liked and what the weather was like. And it kinda grew from there, but that's where the videos started gaining more attention on YouTube than on my website. I was just using the website to show people, this is what you're gonna do on my boat, this is what life is like on Sophisticated Lady. But then I started looking at these statistics on YouTube, and this video's got, like, 30,000 views, 50,000, 60,000 views — where'd that come from? It ain't my audience. Then I started realizing there's this whole other audience of people searching for videos on YouTube. I never envisioned it as being something like that, but that's what was happening. It was that year, I think, 2009, maybe 2010 — I don't remember exactly when — YouTube approached me when they were setting up their new partner program, because they wanted to get their creators involved in the building of the platform. So I was like a grassroots partner. They sent out these emails and said, do you wanna be part of our partner program, if you do, we'll split revenue with you, we're gonna put ads on your videos because people obviously like watching your videos, so we wanna include you in the program to start and see how it goes. So I was like, hell yeah, sure, give it a try — anything that makes money at that point, give me five, ten, fifty bucks, doesn't matter. But after that, I kinda forgot about it, it was just a matter of answering an email, and then nothing happened.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Rick Moore: But YouTube was doing it all in the background, I didn't even know it was happening. I just kept posting videos and wasn't worried about monetizing or anything, not even thinking about it. But I started getting these emails all the time — I always got a lot of spam and everything, but I started getting these emails saying, "Hey, we have money for you, but we need to know your account, you need to hook up your account." I'm like, yeah, right, I'm gonna give you my account, okay, no — I figured for sure it was a phishing scam, "log in here and put in your account information so we can send you money," yeah, okay. But it started happening regularly, and I thought, alright, that's the same email I got at the same time last month, and the month before that. So I started looking, and I'm thinking, alright, well, I'm not gonna log in from this email, but I'm gonna go log in to my own account and see what's going on. And sure enough, I logged in, and YouTube was like, yes, we have a thousand dollars here waiting for you, we need your account information. I'm like, that can't be real — a thousand dollars for me, that was a huge amount of money at the time for something I didn't even know was coming. So I said, okay, well, I linked my account, and sure enough, about a week or so later, there's a thousand dollars in my account in Canada. I'm like, holy crap, when did this happen, how did this even become possible? And that's when I started really focusing on making more and better and different content for YouTube, and I started studying the stats. I've always been a numbers guy, so I follow statistics a lot — I mean, one of the businesses I did just before we got divorced was stock trading, day trading. I loved trading tech stocks and watching them run, and everything. I was just a numbers guy, I could get in and out ten, twenty times a day and always come out of the day with a couple hundred dollars or something, so for me, that was worth it. But the same thing applies to YouTube statistics, because it's all following human emotions and what they react to, what they don't. YouTube would give you information on how to track your videos, how much of the videos people are watching, what parts of the video they're watching, sometimes rewatching certain parts — what videos are more popular than others, why, where people are watching from, what countries, how much time of it they're watching, all this stuff. So I'm like, okay, numbers, now I'm talking. So I just started playing, working the numbers, analyzing them, everything, and then refining, because I was always very good at SEO also. That was one thing that kept my website above all the rest of them in my initial years of chartering in the BVIs — I used to upset a lot of the other charter brokers because I was taking over the popular search terms for the business. But because I was good at it, I could do it myself, I wasn't paying anybody else. It's been like that my whole life — if you wanna learn something, you just learn it. I don't need to go to school, sit there and listen to some guy writing on a chalkboard and take a test — you wanna learn it, you learn it in real life. The boats are there, the information's there, the internet's there — you study what you need to learn, you learn it, that's it. So I did the same thing with all of those things, and that's what kept me alive, basically, through all of these transitions — just the ability to realize you don't need somebody to teach you, you can just go figure it out for yourself.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's awesome.

Rick Moore: And I did. And that just kept YouTube building and building and building. And in 2012 is when I renamed everything, branded everything Ambient Real Life, because to me it was all about the ambiance of real life — experiencing things that people love to dream about and think about but never get to experience for whatever reason, because they're stuck working in a cubicle up north, in a crappy job, no windows outside or anything like that. So I'm like, okay, well, let's start providing some of these people with an escape, something they can tune into for five minutes a day and just watch something and listen to beautiful sounds of waves on the beach or wind in the trees or waterfalls and stuff like that.

Tom Rowland: That seems like a big pivot right there — a place where you decided, okay, I'm not promoting the charter business anymore, I am purposefully going to change from that, I don't expect these people to come, I just want them to watch this video. That seems like you thought about it and made that change into that type of production.

Rick Moore: Yeah, that was very much an investment of the mind, because I realized in one day that for every one person I can actually have on the boat that's willing to pay to be here, there's a thousand people at home that will never be able to get here but would like to experience the same thing in a virtual way. So — I don't think anybody had heard of it back then, but I named them the armchair sailors.

Tom Rowland: Okay.

Rick Moore: So I decided to chase the armchair sailors, because with them, I could attract tens of thousands of people to view the videos and experience them. And they're not paying me for the videos, but I realized that, okay, YouTube is gonna pay me for having people come to my page and view these videos. And so the two of those became a marriage, and then I just kept focusing on it. And the first vlog-style video — everybody kept saying, I started getting comments in some of the early videos, "Love this, love this, but we wanna know who you are, who's Rick, who is this guy, who's the guy filming all this stuff, what's your story?" So that prompted me to start feeling like, okay, they want me to turn the camera on myself, and I didn't like that idea at all. You see some of the first videos, I'm, like, greasy, sweaty, and just like, oh, I don't like talking to the camera, this is not fun. But I started just telling the story and talking about things I was working on, what my vision was, what I wanted to do, and all that kind of stuff. That's when more people started paying attention and watching, and the audience grew in much more different directions.

Turning the Camera on Himself

Tom Rowland: Now, do you have a background of some sort in film, in production?

Rick Moore: No, just a hobby.

Tom Rowland: Just something, just like all these other things, you just taught yourself how to do all this.

Rick Moore: Yeah, I was just a guy — I always had a camera in my hand.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. And so one of the things that I like about the way that you do your videos — and, certainly, I'm starting from the most recent and working my way back, and I tried to watch a whole bunch of different ones on the way — but you just talk to the camera just like you're right there, like you're talking to a friend. And I think that's probably one of the things that people really like about it the most. And then there's a story — each video has a little story, might be as simple as, this is what we're gonna do today, we're gonna fix this thing that's broken, or we're going into town or whatever. But you do have, like, a seemingly production mind, you're able to kind of create a storyline, you're able to talk and narrate this thing really well, just very naturally, like you're just talking to a friend. And I guess that comes from being a captain and being — the hospitality of having these people on the boat, and you're constantly making new friends and talking to people. But that's the way it comes off through the computer, and I think that's why so many people like it.

Rick Moore: I think it was 2013, 2014 when that transition happened, where I started becoming much more eased around the camera, because, like you said, I started teaching myself, because I was reading the comments. And the comments — I wasn't getting bad comments, there was nobody saying, oh, you need to do this different, or don't do that, that's horrible, or any stupid stuff like that. I was getting people that were like, hey, it's so nice to meet you and hear what you're talking about and what you wanna do, and it's really cool, we like it — it's like you're doing something that none of us can do right now, and very few people have done, and I'm just talking about it. But that was when I transitioned in my mind to, okay, I'm not talking to a camera, I'm looking at an eye — a camera that is the link to my new friends.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Yeah.

Rick Moore: So I am talking to my friends when I'm talking to the camera, and that's how it worked in my mind after that. And then from 2014, that's how it's been ever since. And now, I have Maddalena with me now, and she's not comfortable on camera either, but she's migrated a lot recently, because she realizes that the audience loves to hear her talk and see her — they love her, and she's very confident about that now. And she loves to talk to them back now, so I told her, you're not talking to a camera, talk to your best friend.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Rick Moore: Right here, it's your best friend — you just focus on you, and then just pretend you're talking to your best friend in Italy, because you know she's gonna be watching also.

Tom Rowland: Right. Yeah. And that could actually — she comes off great on camera. And then your son also travels with you, is that correct?

Rick Moore: Yeah, no, he's been down many times, and both my sons were down last October — they were here for a month, traveled around with me, we did the whole coast of Panama and all kinds of cool things, so they liked that. They went back to Canada because my one son was taking holidays from his new job — he just graduated university and started in a robotics job, that's Justin. And Brendan, my oldest, he's the one that's been down several times because he has always taken an interest in computers, animation, graphics, video, all that kind of thing. So he took a natural interest in what I was doing, and he doesn't like being on YouTube or being on camera much either, he's very shy, but he's very, very good at what he does. So I said, well, if you wanna work with me, this is something we're working together on, and I give him a percentage of what we do — this is what we're doing here, we're gonna make these videos, and I give you a percentage just because you're helping offload some of my work and focus on other things.

Tom Rowland: Nice.

Rick Moore: No, he was happy with that. He had his graduation in college — he didn't need to, well, he had started off in mechanics and machine work and stuff like that, but he's like, no, I really prefer working on animation and graphics and stuff like that. So my job keeps him working on stuff that he enjoys more, and he can do it at home, so he really likes that as well. He's got a job that he can take with him anywhere — when he's down here, if he travels anywhere else, he can just take his laptop and always do the job.

Tom Rowland: Right. Did he do the animation and graphics on your channel?

Rick Moore: Oh, yeah, he's done all those, all the animations and everything.

Tom Rowland: It's really nice.

Rick Moore: It was one of my original crew that designed the SSL logo, the lady. The logo was designed by Jordan, from Nate and Jordan, who have their own channel now. But they came here before they were on YouTube, and they were my original crew for, I think, maybe four to six months, something like that. And they were the ones we started off with in SSL 001 — I started that series with them, and then they migrated into their own thing. But back to the logo — Jordan designed this logo, and Brendan got his hands on it and started putting it into his computer's graphics program, making a 3D version of it in 3D space, putting different materials on it, making it look different, seeing what's cool, rotating it. And he came up with these animations that I've used ever since — I love them, the audience loves them, we get comments all day long about how much people love the logo, the intro, all that stuff.

Tom Rowland: It's very nice. It's very nice.

Rick Moore: And that's Brendan's handiwork — he's done a lot more than that, but that's the one everybody knows for sure.

The Pandemic, Lockdown, and Losing the Commercial Business

Tom Rowland: Right. So as this kind of matures, and you've gone through a couple of pivots that we've talked about — from Canada, to the charter service, and then to, okay, now I'm like an entertainer, I'm gonna have these YouTube videos — and instead of trying to encourage one person to come and pay you for a charter, you're talking to tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people, and getting paid by YouTube, and that kinda changes everything. And then when I go to your Patreon, it says your goal is to be able to work on SSL full time, producing one video a week consistently — I don't know how long ago you wrote this — and your ultimate goal is to be able to enter the Pacific Ocean as a self-sustainable vessel in all ways, including financially. So is that where we are today, as you're making your way there, and that leads you to Colombia?

Rick Moore: Yeah, that's the transitional period that we're in now. Before lockdown and COVID and all this stuff happened, we were in Panama, and we were doing our last sale — I had made up the last sale, it was gonna be our last charter with guests on board, friends, whoever wanted to book, and that was for the month of February. So we booked out the cabins, they went very quickly, and we did this travel for four weeks with these guys on board that just wanted to come and sail with us. That trip ended here in San Andres, Colombia — we dropped them off here, and we came up here because we wanted to show it to them, it was one of our favorite islands ever. And it's also a duty free port, so it's the one place I can come and receive packages from the States with no duties or taxes or anything like that. Receiving stuff in Panama is enormously expensive and complicated, and that's assuming you even get it, because there's a lot of hands in the way and sometimes your packages disappear. So we decided to ship everything up to San Andres, come up here, meet it, drop off our guests, let them see the island. And two days after we got our packages and the guests were gone, lockdown happened.

Tom Rowland: Yeah.

Rick Moore: And we were supposed to just turn around and go back to Panama. So we thought, alright, they're locking this island down, we better get out of here — we're not gonna get back and get through the canal in time, because we were supposed to go back to Panama, go back to Shelter Bay Marina, get the boat hauled out, do a quick bottom job of paint and everything, put it back in, go through the canal, and be in the Pacific in time to prepare for the trip across to French Polynesia. So this was all gonna be preparations in March and leaving across the South Pacific in April. Inevitably, we ended up stuck here, and we stayed stuck. I mean, we were disappointed for a while, because we watched every day go by realizing, okay, the deadline's gone, we can't cross the Pacific now, it's not happening this year, because cyclone season rolls in April, early May, June — you just don't chance it, it's not worth the risk. So we knew, okay, well, now we got a year to kill, so what are we gonna do? Well, four months, almost five months later, we're still in San Andres. There's been opportunities to go back to Panama, but as much as we can get stuff done there, I just don't wanna be stuck in Panama. There's a lot more rain, a lot more cloudy days, we can't sustain the boat a hundred percent via sun and clear water under the boat — there's a lot of anchorages where we just can't use the water maker because the seawater under the boat is foul, and there's not enough sun to support the boat, we have to run the engine all the time, and I hate that. So we came to San Andres, and luckily, we got stuck in San Andres, because we have everything we need here. Everything is within a five-to-ten-minute walk from the dinghy dock — grocery stores, anything we need. We have sunshine about eight out of ten days, the water under the boat's perfectly clear, so we can use the water maker any day we need without a problem, because the reef is right out front and fresh seawater rolls right in over the reef, right under the boat, at about one and a half to two knots of current, all day, every single day.

Tom Rowland: Nice.

Rick Moore: So it's perfect. We're in 15 feet of water, we can actually go swimming anytime we want.

Tom Rowland: So you have — you're five months into this year to kill. Are you looking at another pivot? Do you have something mapped out in your mind, how this changes your plans even more?

Rick Moore: Well, it does change our plans, and, of course, it introduces complications for us just like everybody else. I mean, we have patrons that help support what we do, which is awesome, we wouldn't be anywhere without those, for sure. We have YouTube paying us revenue for ads on the channel, and that almost makes up enough to keep us going 100% sustained. That's the goal that you're reading on Patreon, to eventually become 100% sustained. I've always made up the rest with my commercial video business, because I make commercials — video commercials for tourism-related businesses, marinas, islands, private islands, hotels.

Tom Rowland: As you're going around the world, wherever you're traveling, you just stop and do that?

Rick Moore: Yeah, everywhere I've been for the last six years, I've always made commercials for these businesses. And the commercials get better, my equipment gets better, my talents get better, my audience gets bigger, the commercials become worth more. And that's what sustained us. March, boom — commercial business gone.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I know.

Rick Moore: Stay on your boat, go to shore once a week, get groceries, go back to your boat. That's it.

Tom Rowland: Now, who tells you that — the government right now, or is there, like, an equivalent of the marine patrol or somebody coming around telling you that in the anchorage?

Rick Moore: Well, that's the rules — the coast guard is here circling and patrolling the island all the time, so they patrol the waters. We're allowed to go to land, but it's up to them on land to monitor who's supposed to be there and who's not. So the police here would set up checkpoints where you have to have your ID with you, whether it's your driver's license, passport, or whatever, and that ID — the last digit of it — reflects the day that you're allowed to be on the street. If you're not — if you're out on the wrong digit, you go home.

Tom Rowland: Wow.

Rick Moore: That's full lockdown, same as everywhere else in the world, except here they had it organized very well — I'm very impressed with how they organized it here. We had no qualms with that whatsoever, we obeyed that, and we were happy that everybody else did. We'd get our one day in the grocery store, pick up everything we need, and we were lucky because we didn't need much, because we were already getting prepared for the Pacific, so we had long-term storage provisions, everything already on board that we just kept accumulating when we were in Panama and when we were here. So lots of stuff to keep us going even for months if we needed to. Going to shore allowed us to get fresh fruits and vegetables, because the influx from land never stopped — they still have ships come in every week that drop off food and supplies to the island, they still have cargo planes come in to drop off food, because this island, I think, has maybe 30,000 population, but on an average day it would have about 50,000 tourists, all day, every day, all year round. So they have infrastructure for keeping this many people alive on this island, and the infrastructure was still there — just no people were allowed to go back and forth.

Tom Rowland: Right. So plenty of supplies. And are you able to get shipments there too — like, if you were to order something from Amazon, you can just do that too?

Rick Moore: We have a big shipment coming in this week, actually, tomorrow. And it's one we've been building up, having stuff sent, because we have suppliers, sponsors — everybody wants to send us gear. We got a whole new electrical system upgrade coming in on this one. So we just send it all to Miami, and when it's all finished, they put it on the ship, which they just did last Friday, and now the ship is on its way here, arrives here tomorrow morning.

Tom Rowland: Great. And so that's gonna be a big project for you, to install that new electrical system while you're sitting there?

Rick Moore: Yeah, that's gonna be another one on the list of projects — we have a ton of projects on the way already. The only problem is we can't bring in any crew to come and help with stuff, and there's no marine facilities on this island, so that's the only trade-off. It's a great place to be, but you can't get your boat fixed here or hauled out or anything like that, so be very careful.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, I guess you have to be very careful. But that's your intention, kinda to stay there until you can make it to the Pacific?

Rick Moore: We were gonna just get our packages this week and then start looking for a weather window to go back to Panama, because Panama will allow us to come in — we just don't wanna sit for months in Panama. But we gotta do a fourteen-day quarantine, and the question is, where do we do it, because that means we can't leave the boat for fourteen days, and the anchorage they want us to do it in is really crappy. It's next to a really nice marina, but it's in the bay inside the Panama Canal where the water is not good, so you don't wanna run the water maker, you're certainly not gonna go swimming — there's other places we'd rather be, but from a practicality standpoint, that's where we're gonna have to go. So we wanna be prepared for that in advance, have everything worked out so that once we're done with quarantine, we've got it worked out where the boat's gonna get the service and everything we need, and continue on with our plan. We don't know if we're gonna go back to Bocas for a little bit or just go through the canal, because we wanna spend part of the season on the Pacific side. But before I venture out into the Pacific, I gotta be confident that we can sustain ourselves — and that's why, when I lost the commercial business, the commercial side of my income, we just said, well, we have nothing else to do, we're gonna focus a hundred percent on YouTube, because at least YouTube does pay something, and the people love watching the videos. And I had no shortage of content — a lot of the other boats and channels were starting to run out of content, because they were locked down and had nothing to talk about or nothing to do or show. Well, we got a ton of content, I had stuff in reserve — we kept even our old series still going until probably well into almost April before we started transitioning. But once we got into real time, that's where people really started to pay attention, because we went live real-time, and everybody's like, wow, okay, he's talking about yesterday, like, for real yesterday.

Tom Rowland: I mean, that live thing, that could be another pivot for you. People seem to really, really like that, especially with somebody like you that they identify with, and they wanna see exactly what's going on right now. That could be a whole new little venture.

Rick Moore: Yeah, I always wanted to be live, it's much more challenging, but I really excel in live because I feel like I'm talking to them in real time, not that it's gonna be something I have to edit in six months and remember what I was thinking about when I made that.

Tom Rowland: Right. Right.

Rick Moore: Here, the editing is fresh, everything happens within a few days — I think the oldest video we've released has been maybe a week old at the most, just because everything we do, there's something going on every day, so there's always something to tell. If something breaks on the boat, we just immediately start working on it. We're just trained, in the mindset — I've always been a bit of a teacher, I did offshore training for years, how to keep the boat going, all that kind of stuff. So for me, instead of talking to a person, now I'm just talking to the camera — alright, engine broke again, let's go have a look at this, find out what's going on, and I'll problem solve it in real time. I don't know what's wrong with it, and we're just gonna go find out, so let's go open it up and see what happens, and that's what we do.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, that's cool. I like those videos, because you can see the wheels turning — and then, you know, I've watched one where the pump was broken in the shower, and you made an attempt to fix it, and that didn't work, and so then you used a cable tie, and that didn't work, and then the hose bust. And then it's like, okay, well, now that looks like when I'm trying to fix my boat — that's how it happens with me, next thing you know, you've destroyed it in the process of trying to fix it, and then that's exactly what happened, you went and got another pump, or Maddie went and got another pump, and reinstalled it.

Rick Moore: Yeah, and this is what I want people to realize — I don't want them to think that all this just happens naturally and organically, oh, it's fixed, okay, yeah, that was easy. We said, oh, it's broken, and look, okay, there, it's fixed. Because it doesn't happen that way in real life, people deserve to know that. So that's why I show them, no, this is the shit — you better be prepared to get your hands dirty, because if you're gonna live on a boat, you can't call, especially here. We've been here five months, there's nobody who can fix anything on this boat on this island.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, eventually, everybody that owns a boat, I guess, has to be able to improvise to an extent. If you own a boat in Key West and you're just there and there's a mechanic available all the time, that's one thing, but if you're a charter boat captain like I was, you end up in the middle of the night with a flashlight in your teeth trying to fix a bilge pump or something, and that's real life. That's why I gravitated towards those videos — I'm like, check this out, he's fixing something, and he says right away, "I don't know what's wrong with it." Okay, that's super real life. You've got a really incredible story, man, and you've been able to do some really amazing things. And when I listen to you tell your story, it's kinda like — it happened, but it doesn't seem like any of it happened really easily. And you've pivoted many times, and here you are, living this life that is beautiful — I mean, it looks like you're getting the very best out of your life, like you're living your best life. And I get emails from people all the time asking me, like, how do I be a fishing guide, how do I get into the fishing industry, how do I follow my dream of opening a retail shop, how do I do this, and I'll tell you what I tell them after I'd like to hear what your advice would be — I'm sure you're getting the same things. Like, you live such a great life — how do I do that? What do you tell people?

Rick's Advice: Stop Buying Stupid Things and Chase Financial Freedom

Rick Moore: Yeah, what do I tell people? Yeah, well, I even just started to tell them — I answered that question in a video a couple of videos ago, when we did a Patreon thank you to all our new patrons, and I answered their questions. And, yeah, I told them: number one, stop buying stupid shit. Number two, focus on your debts. If you're like me, and 99% of the population, you probably got debts — I'm almost out now, but I still carry the same mortgage I started fifteen years ago, because I almost collapsed a couple of times. But in two years, I'm out, finally. And I don't use credit cards or anything anymore, for that reason — that lesson taught me a lot. Credit? No, don't use it — if you can't afford to buy it, don't buy it. So for them, I tell them, if you already have credit, focus on one at a time — say, okay, this credit card, instead of buying that that I don't need, I'm gonna take that money and just put the balance down, down, down, little bit at a time, until that one's empty. Keep it as a backup if you want, you have an emergency, but don't use it. Then the next one, do the same thing. But you gotta start there, because that's your highest interest rate, and those are what most people are trained to operate or live with — their debt as high as they possibly can, living on the monthly payments they can afford. That's why they'll sell you a car on monthly payments — you used to be able to buy a reasonably good car for $10,000, now it's $35,000, because they don't sell you the car anymore, nobody can afford to buy it, it's all monthly payments. It's not, what could you afford to buy — it's how much can you afford monthly.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Rick Moore: We'll take a percentage of your income, and sooner or later, that percentage is so big, you're not going anywhere.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Rick Moore: You think you're free? Just try and leave and go do what you want for six months and see what happens — everything will get shut down, your credit cards will get shut down, you lose your house, you lose your car. That's not freedom. Now, my definition of freedom has changed — freedom is something we like to think of as being able to do what you want when you want, as long as you continue to do what you're told to do. And they train us from birth: do your job, do it well, get paid, go home, kiss your wife, have dinner, watch a movie, go to bed, tomorrow get up and do it all over again. And we will give you anything you can afford within your monthly budget. And that's how most people are living nowadays. And it's unfortunate, but that's what our kids are growing into — not living with how much money can you make, but how much can you afford to spend monthly. Everything is monthly payments, even your cell phone — data plans, people pay more for their cell phones on a monthly basis than I used to pay for my car payment.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Rick Moore: I mean, it's crazy.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, and not even the data plan — you buy your cell phone on monthly payments too, the actual device, that thing costs, like, a thousand dollars now. It's crazy.

Rick Moore: Tell me about it.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, it's crazy. So financial freedom is the key to overall freedom, in your opinion?

Rick Moore: Well, as long as you maintain a huge amount of debt — unless you have a huge income and a nest egg somewhere — you're not going anywhere, unless you find a way to make a lot of money while you go. I mean, if you can find a remote job that keeps paying you — that's why I was forced to, I couldn't just afford to, I'm not rich, I was never retired or anything. I'm a hardworking — I'm one of those guys who works hard for a living instead of working smart, that's the problem. I took chances, I did things most people wouldn't do, and that's the only reason I'm doing it differently here than most people are. But I still live very similar to how they do — I still have monthly payments, people to look after, kids at home, all that kind of stuff. I've just found ways to support it while not being back there on land.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Yeah. One of the other things it seems like you've been able to do is, once you get something going, you seem to be looking ahead — like, you were saying, you put all your eggs in one basket, and then the recession hit, and you couldn't really predict that. Like, I'm getting plenty of charters, I'm out booking the booking agents, and everything is great, and you were smart enough to have something else going on, like the YouTube — even if it's just a little bit, to where it's already started, and now you can grow that as you're seeing difficulties in these other areas. Now you've got the YouTube thing going really nicely, you've got Patreon, and probably some other things going on as well, as the COVID thing shuts down the commercial business, which is another one of your revenue streams. How important do you think it is — and, obviously, you think it's very important — to constantly be looking for new revenue streams to maintain this freedom that you have?

Rick Moore: Well, I think it's very important, because any of them can collapse at any time. If a major recession hits, I fully expected Patreon to collapse for us, because I knew people would have other priorities. And I understand that. And Patreon — we lost maybe 25% in Patreon, and I was very surprised it wasn't more, but obviously not as many people are affected at that level as I originally thought. But Patreon is a great thing for us, because it's people that want to see us keep going, because we are their release, especially now that they're stuck at home, and the only thing they have is watching YouTube, and they get to choose what they wanna watch. They are choosing more and more to watch what we have to show, and they're rewarding us with their views, with their comments, with their shares, and some of them on Patreon with $2, $3, $4, $5 — it doesn't matter. People only think, well, it's only two dollars, but you put a thousand people together, and that's $2,000. So that's a big help in keeping us going. So we're focused on trying to give people what they want — if they wanna learn more, then I'll teach them more, if they just wanna see more, then I show them more. They want more bikinis? Well, I do what I can, but there's only so many going around. The fact is that we want to stay in touch with them and know them also, and know what they want to see us do — do they wanna see us go to the Pacific? Okay, that's why I keep telling them, if they do, this is what we need in order to be able to do that. I can't just venture off into the Pacific, into no man's land, when I live on a monthly revenue stream — if the revenue stream collapses, we're gonna be in the middle of the Pacific with nothing, and I lose everything again. It's a gamble, and it's not worth risking. So at some point, we'll decide, okay, it is worth the risk. But, yeah, I had to figure out where we're gonna replace this commercial video income from — and that's why I just stopped and said, okay, we're focused entirely on YouTube, and I started publishing in real time, averaging two videos per week — some months we publish ten to twelve videos a month, that's a huge amount of work. But I don't have any other job right now, so that's why I put my time into that, because that will show rewards. YouTube rewards us, we get rewarded with more viewers, we're getting more view time — we had, like, forty-five million minutes of watch time last month, that was a record for the channel, and we appreciate that. That's people choosing, across 2.2 million viewers, watching over eight minutes of each video every month.

Tom Rowland: Yeah.

Rick Moore: Or, every, across that many millions of views, I was like, wow, that's — I'm very happy with that, because our average view time — YouTube always said from the beginning, if you can keep people's attention for more than three minutes, you're doing awesome.

Tom Rowland: Wow.

Rick Moore: Because most people will watch something for three minutes and, okay, next, you're gone.

Tom Rowland: And they're sitting there with the mouse in their hand, or the touchpad — they can click away from it so fast and so easy, it's even — it's a little longer process to grab the remote control and change the channel, but on YouTube, it's fickle, man, people can change that immediately.

Rick Moore: Yeah, and it's hard to keep people's attention — you gotta be doing something that they really wanna pay attention to, or they're gone. So, my average video for the longest time was fifteen, sixteen minutes — that's just the most comfortable time I found that people would stay engaged with it, and we had an average of, like, 50% view time on those videos, seven, eight minutes. Now we've got videos that I've started putting out extended versions of, that are just like a full day in the life, and people are like, yes, we love that, keep doing that. But that's a lot of work too — those videos are thirty-five, forty-five, some of them fifty minutes long. But it's just less cutting, I leave more material, and it's just life in the day. And some people enjoy it, some people are like, "Fifty minutes? You crazy? I'm out of here." They won't even watch it because it's fifty minutes. Right? But those aren't the dedicated fans, so we cater to the dedicated ones, and to the rest — they'll come and watch when they want, if they want. We can't please everybody, that's the fact, you know that already.

Tom Rowland: No, you can't please everybody, but you are doing a great job of bringing together a group of people that really likes what you do and likes to watch what you're putting out, and wants to support your goals. And it's very cool, very, very cool. And you got a great story, man. So for everyone that's out there — I don't know, have you put this backstory out there, of how you got to where you are today?

Rick Moore: No, I never really get too much into the history of it. For me, that's in the past — I mean, I started writing a little bio, but I never finished that either, because, you know, right where I left off is where it starts leading into YouTube and onto that next life, next business, and all that stuff. But, no, I don't know, YouTube just kind of has its own flow, and it stays in the present — I find everybody likes it better in the present. Every — I get lots of people ask me, what's your story, man, we gotta know how'd you get here, all that, but it would be a lot of work to go back, that'd be a video that would take months to put together, trying to collect all the information, unless it's just me, like now, talking to you about it and just voice.

The First Business: A Teenage Costume Designer

Tom Rowland: Well, that's gonna be something that your people are gonna really wanna see, and you got a very interesting story. We didn't even get to you being a costume designer for the rock band Platinum Blonde, which I found incredibly interesting.

Rick Moore: Yeah, that was my first business right out of high school. That's where it started for me, that's where I realized the power of words on a piece of paper. Because I was 17 years old, and I had already made the connection with the group, because I just made that jacket with a friend of mine, and that got us noticed. But then I wanted to do it as a business, and the government was offering grants to kids — teenagers, young adults, wanting to start as young entrepreneurs, basically. And I went through that process three times, and they said no thanks, no thanks — I kept rewriting it and sending it back, saying, but what about this, I've got this, I got these people, I made these connections, I can do this. And finally they just said, okay, you've got it.

Tom Rowland: Nice.

Rick Moore: And that's my first thing right out of high school. So I got the grant, then I went to all the car companies, same thing — I needed a car, because the band I was working with was in Toronto, and I lived in Kitchener, so it's an hour drive away, and I needed to go see them, so I needed a car. I wasn't looking for a fancy Porsche or anything, I was looking for anything I could get — I ended up with a Chevy Cavalier, brand new, 1985, as the first one that said yes. Again, I had, like, five companies say no, no, no — got the GMAC, they said yes, you got it. So I got the car, I was in business. I used the grant from the government to put the first couple months payments on a three-story townhouse with a friend of mine — I took over the whole basement, built my shop down there, bought all the sewing gear, because I was making the clothes, designing them, making them, everything from scratch. And, yeah, that was where it all started. But then, after a couple years of that, that's when I just got tired of wintertime and moved to Florida.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. Similar—

Rick Moore: I went to Florida originally to expand in the fashion business, that was my goal. I went with my buddy that I started the fashion business with — my buddy Scott Grollo, from many, many years ago, I haven't talked to him in years, but, wow — we went down to Florida just to check out the fashion scene in Miami, figured that's gotta be the head of everything. I ended up — I never did get into fashion down there, I ended up in audio, in electronics, studying that before I came back to Canada and started my second business. So one thing led to another, just steps along the way.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, nice. Well, I have a similar story of how I ended up in Key West — I tried to spend a winter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and it was far too cold, and I went as far south as you could get, all the way to the southernmost point, and stayed there. So I can appreciate your intolerance of the cold — I have the same thing. I can go visit, but I don't really wanna stay there that long.

Rick Moore: That's exactly what I said when I was that age — I said, I wanna go as far south as I can go without falling off the land.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, well, I'm surprised we didn't meet in Key West — we would have met at the southernmost point. Hey, man, what's up, man?

Rick Moore: Yeah, I ended up spending a lot of time down there, I loved it. And even after I moved back to Canada, I still used to go down four times a year for a couple weeks at a time — I'd take my car down because I love driving, that was a big favorite hobby, because I had the stereo in it, you know, I'd zip down through the Virginia mountains, love those winding roads, I always had sports cars. It was a great drive, and I'd end up down in Florida and spend a couple of weeks hanging out with my friends. All my suppliers for the car audio business were down there, so I'd load up the car full of stuff and drive back to Canada.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, nice, nice. Well, you've been able to make a great life for yourself, and, obviously, you've made some good decisions and some good pivots, and you're giving some good advice to people that want to do something kind of the same, that are really afraid to. I think the financial freedom part is the best advice you could give anyone.

Rick Moore: I've had a lot of help along the way, and I'm certainly not financially free either — I'm still working towards it, but that's why people ask me, and I tell them. I have my family, I was lucky to have them to fall back on when times were really down and out, so I thank my family every day for that and all the support, and just encouraging me to keep going. The partner that I took on in this business, that helped me get here in the first place, Dr. Charles Vanderwater — I thank him for his support, because without that, I probably would have found a way to do it, but not nearly as well, as easy as we did. Having somebody who just says, yeah, here, you got this much money to keep you going for the month, and everything will get started — that was a big help along the way, for sure. Having my kids along, that's always kept me going, because I wanna make sure they're looked after as well, I don't wanna disappoint them. That was the reason I had to make sure they were left behind in a comfortable situation — the house was paid for, they didn't have to worry about losing their house or their home if my bold move collapsed.

Tom Rowland: Yeah.

Rick Moore: So if I went down, I didn't wanna take them with me — that's why I just signed it all off on the bank and accepted responsibility for it all on my own. Well, that's nice — got a lot of people to be thankful for as well, and now I'm thankful for the YouTube audience, they are the ones that are keeping me going, because they seem to like what I have to show them, what I've done, what I've planned to do, and what I might do with them in the future.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, well, they love it.

Rick Moore: Thanks to all.

Finding Sailing Sophisticated Lady Online

Tom Rowland: Well, tell everybody that is not familiar with your YouTube channel and your Patreon and everything else, how they could find you, support you, follow you.

Rick Moore: Well, we just rebranded everything — I mean, we talked about it when I started Ambient Real Life, but that just used to confuse people, because it's not really tied to Sailing Sophisticated Lady. So I just rebranded everything — our Instagram is now Instagram Sailing Sophisticated Lady, and Maddalena has been running that, and she does a phenomenal job, because that's something I don't really have a lot of time for, and I'm not really that much into pictures, I'm focused on videos. So she loves the picture aspect, she looks after Instagram, so they can go and say hi to her there, and she loves to hear from them, so that's always nice. YouTube is the same thing — YouTube slash Sailing Sophisticated Lady. Patreon is the same thing — if somebody wants to throw in a dollar or two to help us keep going, as they like what we're doing and want us to keep going, Sailing Sophisticated Lady. Everything is the same. And we're just setting up the new website now — my son is actually building our new website, so we're about to close Ambient Real Life, and we've moved everything over to sailingsophisticatedlady.com. So everything will be focused in there, and that's where we're gonna have a lot of real-time stuff. I've set up a huge security system on the boat, because I need to protect my stuff — we have eight cameras, and I'm gonna put four of the outdoor cameras live on the website, because one thing people always loved when I was chartering was getting live images from a webcam on the bow. So I'm gonna do that again for our YouTube audience, so they can check in and see where we are, what the boat is like, what's around the boat, where we are, what the weather's like. We're gonna have real-time weather reporting from the boat too, because, obviously, we collect all of our energy from nature, so I'm trying to get people to think in that mindset at the same time. And by showing them connections with our immediate weather around the boat, and how we predict weather using PredictWind software and all that kind of stuff, how that all ties back to how much we actually produce on the boat for energy — I can get all this kind of energy feedback from my systems that show me exactly how much sun we had, how much wind we had, all this stuff, and I wanna put those graphs available for people to view on the website.

Tom Rowland: Nice.

Rick Moore: So they can actually tune in and see how our immediate weather translates to what we generated that day, what we consumed, because it shows our consumption too. We've converted the whole boat to electric, got rid of gas — I mean, we still have a gas stove as a backup, but all of our cooking, microwave, everything is all electric, all run from the sun.

Tom Rowland: Wow.

Rick Moore: All of our drinking water comes from the sea, but it's desalinated by a solar-powered desalinator. And these are all products I've been working with, from people who send them to us because they want us to test them. If I see something I really want, I'll go and ask them, hey, can we do something — but sometimes they just send me stuff, and I'm like, wow, I wish I'd known about this earlier, I would have asked, because there's some really cool stuff available.

Tom Rowland: There is. In one of your videos, you went to the gas dock, and you said something like — I have it in my notes somewhere — you had burned just a really tiny amount of gas over an incredibly long period of time, and you were attributing that to the solar, obviously.

Rick Moore: Yeah, I think that video was Guatemala, I think.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, it was, like, I don't know, very few gallons of gas.

Six Gallons of Diesel in Five Months

Rick Moore: But we've been here in lockdown now, and this is why I say we're thankful and lucky that we've been in lockdown here in San Andres with this environment, because in the five months that we've been here, I checked my hour meter the other day, and we've burned a total of six gallons of diesel fuel.

Tom Rowland: Wow. In five months, you've burned six gallons of diesel fuel.

Rick Moore: Five months, six gallons.

Tom Rowland: And so — I mean, that's such a small amount. It's for something, obviously, very crucial — what does the diesel run on your boat at this stage?

Rick Moore: It's just there as a backup power generator for the batteries. So if we don't have enough sun, we have to run the engine, because it has dual high-output alternators on it.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Rick Moore: And those alternators charge the batteries. So if we run low in power, and there's not gonna be enough sun — we know it's gonna be cloudy tomorrow or anything — we have to run the engine for a couple hours, few hours, whatever, just to bring the power back up a little bit so that we still have electricity, just for our basics. When it's not sunny, we trim down, we don't use extraneous things that we don't need to. But when we have lots of sun, we have more power than we could use — we turn down the fridge temperature, we crank up the freezer temperature, we turn on the electric fans, we turn the water maker on, we start doing laundry, we've got a laundry machine here now, that kind of stuff. We just use the power, even ice makers — we have an ice maker that's fully solar-powered, we only use it when our batteries are already full and we're wasting power from the sun.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Rick Moore: We turn on the ice maker, the water maker, anything else that we need.

Tom Rowland: That's cool. And then you got the whole thing going with your plants, which is really cool — I see some in the background right there, you're growing stuff all over your boat, even stuff you can eat, like the basil. So it's really cool, you got a whole green — I mean, the boat is completely self-contained, really, for the most part. How big is your fuel tank, that diesel tank? How much could that hold?

Rick Moore: It holds 105 gallons, and we have three or four jerry cans that we keep as backup that hold five gallons each, so let's say a 20-gallon reserve.

Tom Rowland: No question that you could go for as long as you wanted to, as long as you had sun. Right? I mean, like, if you had a—

Rick Moore: We can go a long time.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, it's incredible, it's awesome, man. Totally off the grid, that's amazing.

Rick Moore: And we don't use gas for anything anymore, other than the barbecue, because propane, as we get into other areas of the world, becomes very hard to find, and the bottle sizes are all different, fittings are different — it becomes very complicated, if you can even find it. I don't really wanna give up my gas power, because it's the one thing I really enjoy using, but I've been thinking — I'm gonna find somebody out there who's gonna help me work on this idea. I've already refined it to the point where I know I can generate the gas, but I'm gonna start using excess solar power, build a little hydrogen generator that's gonna extract hydrogen from seawater using solar power that's left over and wasted anyway. Collect that and store it, make a new burner for the barbecue — barbecue as a hydrogen barbecue.

Tom Rowland: Wow. Man, don't blow yourself up, sounds dangerous.

Rick Moore: No, no different than propane, really — in fact, it's more safe than propane. But it doesn't have the density of propane, so it's too expensive for commercial use in most of the world right now, haven't got it to that level yet. But here, we don't have to pay for a major production facility, we don't have to pay for major storage, we don't have to pay for major transportation to get it here — those are things all eliminated from the cost when you use it on a boat that lives in the water. You're surrounded by the energy already, all you have to do is physically extract it from the seawater — it's there, I mean, H2O, two molecules of hydrogen, one oxygen. Simple electrolysis, you can extract the hydrogen, contain it — it doesn't have to be a ton of it, because you can make it any day you want, it's always there, you just use extra sun, you make enough for a couple of barbecues, and you're good to go, just make some more when you need it.

Tom Rowland: Man, that's—

Rick Moore: But, no, I think that's gonna be a cool little idea. I'd love to look at it for a means of propulsion, to replace the diesel, or maybe even offset the diesel, because I know they've made diesel engines that are a lot more efficient through the addition of hydrogen into the combustion mixture. So that's a possibility also. But, really, I would like to replace the diesel at some point — I'd love to go electric, but it's not there yet, and it's way too expensive. This size of boat would need a 60-kilowatt motor, which is gonna be, like, $20,000 to $30,000, and it needs, like, $40,000 worth of batteries that would run it for maybe six hours. But then you still have to replace that energy from somewhere — where does it come from? You can't make enough from sun on a boat this size, so you'd still need an electric generator in order to replenish the batteries. So there's not enough benefit to doing that for me right now, so I stay with the diesel. But I do look at putting some kind of extra propulsion, like a small electric motor that's just enough to keep the boat going at two to three knots based on the solar system that we have, so that when we're stuck in the doldrums, crossing the Pacific or anything like that, we can still keep moving, whereas, normally, you'd be stuck unless you used up your diesel fuel.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, wow, that's awesome, man. I think you'll do it — that's my forecast, I think you'll make it happen.

Closing

Rick Moore: I'm talking about it — usually, I'm already on my way to doing it if I'm talking about it.

Tom Rowland: That's what I figured, I figured it's halfway done right now. Well, listen, it's been a great opportunity to talk to you and meet you and just kinda catch up on who you are.

Rick Moore: Yeah, nice to meet you as well, Tom, I appreciate the time.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you very much — please tell Maddie and the crew that everyone from the mainland and YouTube says hello, and they'll be looking forward to hearing this story.

Rick Moore: Yeah, and this is Maddalena — she just got here, so I'll bring her in to say hi.

Tom Rowland: Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Everybody loves you on YouTube — I look in the comments, and they definitely love you.

Rick Moore: Oh, she can't hear you, but I'll pass it on. Okay.

Tom Rowland: Alright, well, it sounds great — Rick and Maddy, thank you very much, I hope you guys have fair winds, as you say, and have an awesome rest of the day.

Rick Moore: Thank you very much, sir. Alright, I'll let you know how your day sounds. Take care.

Tom Rowland: See you.